


some kind of miracle

by puddingandpie



Series: we who make the choice [1]
Category: SKAM (Norway), Sense8 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sense8 (TV) Fusion, Bipolar Disorder, Coming Out, Coming Out Sensate, Family Feels, Homophobic Language, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-01
Updated: 2018-03-01
Packaged: 2019-03-25 14:10:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 41,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13836411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/puddingandpie/pseuds/puddingandpie
Summary: Isak hallucinates a boy — that is, until he figures out that Jonas Vasquez and the eight other people suddenly showing up in his life are actually real. Manoeuvring nine new friendships with people that are actually a part of his head forces Isak to confront some things about himself, such as that Vilde’s great cooking shows him once again that he should probably start working on his own culinary skills and that Even’s incredibly good looks make it really, really impossible to still look at girls and pretend that’s who he’s truly into.tldr; the sense8 au you never knew you wanted (until now)





	some kind of miracle

**Author's Note:**

> hi!
> 
> when i started this fic about five months ago, i actually never thought i would get here, but here i am, posting the longest one shot ive ever written.
> 
> there is actually a sequel in the works for this, the sequel being where the idea for this actually started, and im mentioning it here so that i actually get off my ass and post it. 
> 
> i have a few people to thank for getting me all the way here; 
> 
> [zilver](), my wife and the love of my life; thank you endlessly for putting up with my complaining and groaning and everything that comes with being married. i love you so much.
> 
> [makayla](), my fic partner in crime; even though you know nothing about sense8 you still read this over and over again when i made u. i love u more than words <3 
> 
> special thanks to the Morally Ambiguous squad; [caroline](), [mikki](), [sarah](), [mack](), [wyo](), [julia 1]() and [julia 2](); you girls are the best thank u for encouraging the shit out of me always. (julia 1 organised this whole thing so thank u so much for actually giving me a due date and making me follow it)
> 
> but overall, the biggest thanks has to go out to [marta](), who has put so much time, effort and love into making art for this fic. marta, my mega me, thank u for absolutely everything. i love u <3
> 
> the link to marta's tumblr post with all the art for this is here: [x]()
> 
> and to all of you reading this, thank you, and i hope you enjoy :)

 

-

Isak can hear the pounding of the bass from three blocks up, which serves as a deafening reminder of the way his night is about to go. He really doesn’t want to be spending his Friday night at a house party, not while he is nursing a migraine worse than any he has ever had before, but it isn’t like he has a choice.

He had been on the tram last Friday night coming home from a party out in Grønland, one he had been dragged to by Eskild, who had cited the fact that Isak hadn’t left the house for anything other than school in weeks.

The host of the party was one of Eskild’s flamboyant and constantly stoned international exchange friends, this time from Belgium, and international exchange friends meant only two things to Isak: booze and glitter. He had left the party early that night, a lot earlier than Eskild, citing a killer headache (much like the one he had now), but really it was because of the people and the way they all seem so open with themselves. It had left a disconcerting feeling in his stomach, one that had come on quickly and out of the blue and that Isak had wasted no time in trying to get rid of. It lasted the whole way home however, no thanks to the incident on the tram.

Because the world seemed to have it out for him, Elias had been on the tram home as well, surrounded by about five of his asshole friends. Isak had tried to get off at the first stop he could, but he had already been noticed and his attempt had been quickly thwarted, leaving him exposed to a wave of mockery and teasing. The moment they noticed the glitter on his cheek, there’d been no hope for him.

He’s only about a block away now, as he reaches into his back pocket to check that the weed he has is still there. It’s a comforting weight, a reassurance that if everything at the party goes to shit he can just pull the _too stoned excuse_ and make a hasty exit. It’s something that he has been doing more often than not recently.

“Look who decided to show up, hm?”

“Fuck off Elias.”

Elias is sitting on the door again, slouching in one of those pull open camping chairs and lazily sipping on a beer. His face splits into a slimy grin the moment he spots Isak, and he lifts his beer up in a sort of mock salute. Flipping Elias off as he walks past, Isak pushes his way into the party, which already proves to be a mistake. He probably should have tried to gradually introduce himself to the loud noise, or maybe even go around the back, but it’s too late now.

The pain in his head suddenly goes from severe to debilitating, his head feeling like it’s about to split open. He has tried almost every over the counter painkiller in the last three days, taking four different ones in the last hour to try and feel at least decent for the party, but nothing has even made a slight dent to relieve the pain in his head.

Painkillers aren’t the only thing he’s tried either. Much to his shame, and Eskild’s glee, Isak went back on his vow on day two of this migraine and asked Eskild for one of his ‘miracle cures’. Eskild’s glee faded very quickly however when the ‘miracle cure’ had the same results as the painkillers; i.e. nothing at all.

An upstairs bathroom is about the only place you can go for privacy at a house party, so that’s where Isak finds himself, hiding behind a hopefully locked door while he goes for hit after hit from his shitty homemade bong.

Weed is Isak’s vice. It is the only reason why he still speaks with Elias, because he is the only person at Nissen who Isak knows that sells it. Elias always claims that he gives Isak a good price for it because they’re friends, but that’s before he slings his arm around Isak’s neck to put him in a headlock and call him a fag. As much as he tries to hide it, Isak doesn’t think that there is anything he hates more than he hates Elias.

Just as he finally starts to relax, someone casually strolls into the bathroom. His entire body tenses up, his vision going shaky for a second as his hand flys out to grip the side of the bathtub. When he sees that the person who walked in isn’t Emma, the anxiety disappears slightly. Isak leans back against the bathtub, half-heartedly wondering about the bathroom door that he didn’t hear open.

Isak focuses in on the boy who is now standing in the bathroom with him, trying to pinpoint him as one of Emma’s friends or not. When he can’t, his stoned mind begins taking in the boy and his looks for himself. He’s tall, with olive skin and wild dark curls, and when Isak thinks about it, he doesn’t actually look like the average blonde haired blue eyed Norwegian. In fact, he doesn’t look Norwegian at all.

The boy walks over to the sink, splashing himself in the face with water probably to try to psych himself up for something. When he looks up, he makes eye contact with Isak through the mirror. Isak smiles a little at him. For a split second, he thinks that maybe he should offer the boy a hit, because the stressful look on his face makes Isak feel like he needs it. But the moment his face darkens in frustration with the look clearly aimed at Isak, he tenses up.

“Are you kidding?”

Isak’s face contorts into a scowl. “Do you have a problem?”

“Yes. This is a bathroom.”

“And this is a party. So what?”

Suddenly, the dark look on the boy’s face disappears, immediately being replaced with concern and confusion. “Dude, you’re in the restaurant bathroom,” he says in horror, before looking down at Isak’s hands and noticing the bong in his hands. “How stoned are you?”

Isak rolls his eyes at the boy.

“Dude. You’re at a house party,” he says incredulously, his speech a little slower than normal. “How stoned are _you_?”

Isak’s words seem to trigger something in the boy, because he then looks around him, his eyes widening in panic when he takes in his surroundings. He then takes a cautious step forward, and then another, his hand reaching out slowly, inching ever closer to the bathtub that Isak is sitting in. The moment his fingers make contact with the porcelain rim, his hand shoots back lightning fast, almost as if he has been burned.

“It’s solid,” he states.

Isak raises his eyebrows. “Of course it’s solid, it’s a goddamn bathtub.” He holds his bong out, offering it to the boy. “Do you want a hit?”

The boy runs a hand through his hair, considering his options for a second. He’s crouching next to the bathtub now, still looking around the room like he can’t believe he’s really here. He doesn’t reply to Isak verbally, but he does take the bong.

Isak watches him with wild curiosity as he carelessly throws the bong around in his hands, fitting with the rest of his behaviour as an attempt to try and determine whether what he’s holding is actually real or not. Staring at him now, it suddenly occurs to Isak that maybe this boy is on a wild LSD trip or something.

The idea that Isak should warn the boy about mixing drugs comes too late, because now the boy is sitting beside him in the bathtub, passing the bong back to Isak.

“Man, this weed kind of sucks.”

“Fuck off,” Isak says lightly, the ghost of a smile flicking over his face. He takes another drag from the bong, trying to gather his thoughts long enough to make sense of them. He isn’t stoned enough yet that they are a jumble, which is good. Suddenly, he realises that although this boy and him are sharing weed, they haven’t done all the introductions that come with a typical social interaction.

“Isak. Valtersen.”

He adds his last name as an afterthought, in case the boy wants to add him on Facebook later or something.

“Jonas Vasquez. Where the fuck am I?”

“Somewhere in Briskeby I think?”

“Briskeby?” Jonas’ eyes narrow in confusion. “Where the fuck is that?”

Isak shrugs. “Oslo, where else?”

“Like Oslo, Norway?” Jonas’ eyes suddenly widen, as he turns around to look at Isak properly this time, his eyes scanning him up and down as he tries to take in everything about him. Something in Isak lights up in fear, but he quells that down and just rolls his eyes.

“No like Germany. Of course like Norway? Man where the fuck do you think you are?”

“Cuba.”

“Like Havana? The song?”

“Yeah, like Havana.”

“For fucks sakes, wrong continent man.”

There are alarm bells ringing at a mile a minute in Isak’s head. There is a guy next to him who thinks he is in Cuba, who looks Hispanic and who thinks they are in a restaurant bathroom. The only thing that is keeping the thoughts of his mum out of his head is the weed, calming him down and ridding him of his anxiety. Where that anxiety should have been has been replaced with a feeling that Isak doesn’t get much of these days, of friendship and contentment and solidarity, and that’s enough for him to be relishing in it for as long as he has it.

Jonas steals the bong back from him to take another drag. When he finishes, pushing the smoke out from between his pursed lips, he begins to speak. “I was, or I guess I am on this date. With a girl. Daniela or something, I don’t really remember.” He takes another hit. “It’s going terrible. She doesn’t have her own opinion. She’s just another one of those airheads you know, someone who goes along with what everyone else likes without working it out for herself. It’s fucked man.”

For some reason, that is the funniest thing Isak has ever heard, even though it isn’t really a joke as much as it is a story. Perhaps it is his laughing that summons the one person that Isak wanted to avoid tonight. The bathroom door slams open, effectively cutting off his laughter. He turns away from Jonas to see Emma standing in the doorway grinning at him. He smiles back at her, Jonas’ presence making it more genuine than usual.

“There you are! I’ve been looking for you. Why have you been hiding up here all alone?”

“I’m not alone, I’m with…”

Isak turns around to gesture to Jonas, but where Jonas was sitting five seconds ago is now just empty space. Emma frowns at him.

“There’s no one there Isak?” She looks down at his hands, the plastic bottle in her hand finally registering as a bong. Her expression then shifts from concern to disappointment as she runs a hand through her hair, getting frustrated with it when it catches on a knot. “Isak. You know how I feel about drugs.”

“Emma,” he protests, but it’s half hearted, and he can already feel that this might already be his ticket out of here.

“ _You_ need to go home. I don’t know what you have been smoking, and to be honest, I don't want to know.”

“No, I swear…” He goes to fight her again on this, but then it suddenly occurs to him how this must look to her. Frantic, red rimmed eyes blown wide, talking about someone who isn’t even there; he is the textbook definition of someone who has just been doing hard drugs, and even though Isak knows that Emma has next to no knowledge about drugs, she’s at least seen enough movies to put some puzzle pieces together.

She rolls her eyes at him in frustrated exasperation. “Go home Isak,” she states firmly. “Sleep this off, apologise to me for it and then start sucking up. God knows you’re gonna need to.”

Part of Isak wants to protest more, because there was someone who was just sitting there, but this was his way out of hooking up with her. Emma offers out her hand and he grabs it, pulling himself up. When he stumbles a little, falling against her, he can feel the way her body stiffens in frustration. She then entangles their fingers together, but her hand is sweaty against his and the whole experience of hand holding with her is generally unpleasant, so Isak has to force himself to keep holding on. She takes him down the stairs and back out the front door. When Isak realises where their exit route leads, his insides sink at what he’s going to have to do.

The moment that they come in sight of Elias, he moves a little closer and starts to press sloppy kisses to her jawline, and she makes little attempt to push him off.

“Oh look, Isak found a girl to hook up with. Looks a little bit too much like a boy, don’t you think Isak?”

“Don’t be fucking rude Elias,” Emma says, scowling at Elias before looking back at Isak with concern. “Are you okay to get home Isak?”

“Why don’t you come home with me?” He tugs on her arm, playing it up for Elias who was sitting back and watching it unfold in front of him. “I can start making it up to you now?”

“You’re too out of it Isak. Next time.”

“I’ll hold you to that.” Isak grins at her and reaches around the back of her neck to pulls her in close, kissing her sloppily. Much to his relief, she pushes him off quickly and away from her.

“Home,” she says firmly, sending him off with another parting kiss. Elias wolf whistles behind the two of them, cackling wildly and throwing insults at Isak as he moves slowly down the street and back to the kollektiv.

 

-

 

When Isak wakes up the next morning, last night is just a haze in the back of his mind. He reaches over for a painkiller, in keeping with the routine he’s had for the past three days, but as his body starts to wake up his brain comes online too, and he realises that he doesn’t actually need it anymore. Instead, Isak aborts the movement and flips back over so that he is lying on his back and staring up at the ceiling, trying to piece together the events of the night before.

It takes him a while, but it’s almost like a chain reaction. The moment he has one thing, the rest come flying to hit him like a ton of bricks. His chest begins to seize up, his breaths coming irregularly. He sits up sharply, trying to remember what he was once told to do in the event of a panic attack.

_Five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can feel, two things you can smell and one thing you can taste._

He lists them all off slowly to himself, trying to calm his racing heart. The weed he smoked last night was enough to stave this off, but now the thought he is thinking now is the only idea in his brain.

Since the moment his dad sat him down at thirteen and explained to him what was going on with mamma, he has been able to recite the symptoms for schizophrenia better than his times tables. As he got older, the research he did became more advanced, and now the information comes to him easier than anything he’s ever studied at school.

And he _hallucinated_ a boy last night.

Isak isn’t stupid, and his thoughts aren’t clouded by weed anymore, so he knows exactly what this means. It means he’s at breaking point, his mind about to crumble under the sheer amount of stress he puts on it. He can’t stop the tears from welling up in his eyes, as Isak buries his head in his hands and tries to concentrate on anything else other than reliving the memories of his mother, the ones from after when his dad left.

He can’t.

They’re all dancing around his head, teasing and taunting him about the future he needs to start expecting for himself. The most vivid one is from the time right before his dad left for good, when he still said he was on a business trip to Japan or Korea and not looking for a house where he could run away from Isak and his mother and their life.

His stomach turns when he thinks about it, but he can’t make himself look away. The memory is there now, and it will not leave him alone, instead planting itself in his brain and digging the roots of itself in hard.

Isak remembers the way that the porcelain felt as it fell down onto his shoulders, and the sound of the plate shattering above him that followed. The way that his mother’s gaze felt on him, the pure fire in her eyes. He remembers her screams and chants, all about the demons that were coming to kill Isak for his sins and how most of all he needed to _atone._ Most of all though, he remembers that word written all over the white walls, the stark black paint making his mother’s shaky letters stand out even more. It’s that word that is coursing through his brain now, preventing him from thinking about anything else except the sins his mother told him over and over again that he needed to atone for.

Repent. Repent. Repent. Repent.

Isak’s mother was never specific with her demands for Isak’s atonement. It was mostly just a constant reminder that he needed to, that he would never get into heaven unless he repented for the pure evil that he was doing on Earth.

Everyday Isak would have to pretend to himself that he didn’t know exactly what his mother was talking about, that it was just a general statement, all while shoving down that voice deep inside him so that his guilt didn’t swallow him whole.

He knows exactly what he has to repent for. He’s just never admitted it to himself.

The idea that he is going to become exactly like his mother scares him most of all though. He doesn’t want a life where demons crawl on the walls and where the bible and God and repentance become his entire life. But most of all he’s scared that maybe his mother, the real mother that loves him, is trapped inside her body, and that one day that will be him too, banging on the door with no one around to hear his cries for help. He’s scared that he will grow to hate himself more than he already does.

He is jolted quickly out of his thoughts by Eskild’s heavy footsteps moving quickly down the hall, his distinct lazy half-shuffle caused by his feet dragging along the floor becoming deafeningly loud in the cramped hallway. There is nothing that Isak can do now to disguise the way he is feeling. There’s not enough energy in his body left for that.

“Isak!” Eskild coos cheerily from the hallway. “I made you…”

He stops suddenly in the doorway when he sees Isak curled up in on himself. Heavy tears are sliding down his cheeks, and Isak makes an aborted effort to try and wipe them away, but they just keep coming.

“Pancakes.” Eskild finishes lamely. “Are you okay?”

Isak opens his mouth to speak, but the words die on his tongue, and all that comes out is a strangled and intelligible sound. Eskild takes this as a sign to drop the plate of pancakes on the dresser next to the door and clamour quickly over to Isak, wrapping him up in a hug tighter than anything Isak has received in years. He just lets Isak sob heavily into his chest, running his hands through his hair in an attempt to calm him down.

The thoughts that still occupy Isak’s head are exhausting, but they’re beginning to slow down enough for Isak to filter the worst ones out. The only one he can’t get rid of is the idea that his mind will one day make him behave in a way that will ruin the few relationships he has left and that will isolate him more than he already is.

“Do you want to tell me what’s wrong?” Eskild whispers softly.

Isak gulps, the sheer amount of ways he could ask this question to Eskild weighing heavy on him. “Would you still love me if I was sick?”

“Sick?” The word makes the tears start coming again, so Isak curls back into Eskild and rests his head on his shoulder, letting the wet patch that has already formed there grow again.

“Schizophrenia,” he mumbles, the word barely audible, but Eskild freezes up underneath him. The hand pauses from where it was rubbing circles on Isak’s back. Eskild lets out a deep sigh, before he pulls Isak back and rests a hand on each shoulder, holding Isak up. If it wasn’t for that, Isak might have toppled over entirely. He bends down so that he is peering up at Isak, his eyebrows furrowed in heartfelt concern as he forces them to make eye contact, which for some reason calms Isak down.

“Oh Isak, of course I would. Of course I would.” Eskild pauses in a way that Isak can see the cogs that are turning in his head, pondering his next question. When he does eventually ask it, his voice is soft, and free of judgement. “Is this you trying to tell me you have schizophrenia?”

Isak starts to shake his head, but then aborts the action halfway through. “I don’t know Eskild. I’m scared.”

“Okay, then what’s this about? Why are you thinking about this now?”

“It’s about my mum. She’s got paranoid schizophrenia. I have to uh, put her back in the mental hospital again, because Dad has some business thing in Japan and I really can’t take care of her. I can’t do it again.” He chokes the whole thing out, between tears and sobs and sniffles. Eskild doesn’t flinch the entire time.

And that’s true. Isak does have to put his mum back into a higher security facility next week, which is something he hasn’t really been thinking about at all. Now, he doesn’t know whether he’ll be able to face her in that situation, where everywhere he looks is going to be a reminder of the life he might potentially have to lead.

“Listen to me very clearly here okay, because you need to understand this. It isn’t your responsibility to take care of her, Isak. You’re a teenager, and she’s an adult, and mental illness or not that means you are not in a position where you can take care of her. She is moving to a facility so that she can get help from professionals who know what they are doing, and who can help her a lot more than you can, alright?”

Eskild’s words are exactly what he needs to hear right now, and the comfort that they begin to bring him come accompanied with another round of crying. It feels cathartic to cry now for some reason, the idea that his mother might maybe be his mother again filling him with irrational hope.

But before long, his thoughts get sidetracked as he thinks about his own future, picturing himself in his mother’s position with Eskild at the door sending him off into one of those _places_.

Eskild’s shoulders slump as he puts the pieces together, but waits a second for Isak to compose himself more before asking the question. “This isn’t just about your mum is it?”

Isak looks up at him with a sad smile, the corner of his lips shaking. He pauses for a second, trying to work out how to best explain to Eskild what happened at the party.

“Schizophrenia isn’t necessarily genetic,” he begins, his voice breaking, “but if you have a family history of psychosis you’re more likely to have it.”

Eskild’s face drops, his eyes filling with worry and pity and most of all love, as he draws Isak into him and swaddles him up and surrounds him in as much love and support that he can muster up.

“I’m so scared Eskild,” he sobs, burying his face into Eskild’s shoulder. “I’m so scared.”

There are no more tears left in Isak’s body, he’s worn them all out by now, so all that he can do now is dry heave and wait for the immeasurable sadness to pass.

Isak wants to tell Eskild about the boy in the bathtub, he wants to more than anything. But he’s too tired to get the words out, the bottled up emotions from fears he has pressed deep down into himself now erupting messily and without fear of consequence.

The idea that he could be schizophrenic scares him more than anything else, because of the way that it ruined his mother and her marriage. Because of the way that it ruined everything around her.

Isak has never had many friends, he knows that, and never anyone close enough that he could call a sibling. But the people he does have, Eskild and Linn, they’re his family, and if he turns out like his mother, becoming so hard to deal with that the people are supposed to love you unconditionally just pack up and leave, then that’s the point of no return. What’s the point after that?

Eskild shifts the two of them around so that Isak’s head is resting gently in his lap, just in the right position for Eskild to card his fingers gently through Isak’s hair. It doesn’t take long for Isak to fall into a dreamless oblivion, the sound of rain hitting the windowpane heavily in the background.

-

 

Isak wakes up in the same position, a crick in his neck and his muscles stiff and sore. His eyes hurt when he tries to open them, so they stay shut for a while as he tries to gather together enough energy to move. His thoughts have stopped moving so fast; in fact they’ve stopped entirely. His body feels heavy and exhausted, but the fact that he isn’t thinking about the future anymore makes him feel a little lighter than before.

He’s not lying on Eskild’s lap anymore, but Eskild is sitting next to him, the plate of pancakes that were originally supposed to have been for him lying eaten next to his legs. He’s scrolling through his phone, occupying himself in a way that meant he didn’t have to leave Isak’s side once. Isak is more grateful for Eskild right now than he could ever express in words.

Eskild notices him stirring before Isak can say anything, and places his phone down on the table beside him, turning to face Isak more. Isak’s already looking up at Eskild from the position he’s in, his body twisted in the middle, but the longer he stays there the more uncomfortable it becomes, so he flips himself over. “Hey sleepyhead.”

Isak softens a little, rubbing his eyes with his hand.

“Do you need anything? Maybe something hot to drink?”

Isak doesn’t really have the energy to reply, but he relaxes slightly into the bed, a response which Eskild takes as a yes. He pushes himself up, muttering an _I’ll be back in a second_ before retreating to the kitchen. The casual and dismissive tone of Eskild’s voice when he says it means that it couldn’t be anything but genuine, and the reassurance that Isak gets that he isn’t going to be alone in this unlocks something in Isak’s chest, makes the weight on his shoulders feel a little lighter.

Isak has never been that emotionally vulnerable with someone before, at least not in a long time. He’s not surprised at the amount of shame that now clings to him, because the aftermath was always going to be brutal. But there’s a little voice in the back of his head as well, reminding him that Eskild is his family, and this is what family is supposed to do. Perhaps he feels this much shame about his break down because of the example that his blood family set for him, the way that his dad ditched and ran when everything got too hard.

He lies there for a while, the memory of the hallucination starting to play out in his mind. Suddenly, adrenaline begins to pulse through his body, and he sits up abruptly, his eyes blown wide. Jonas gave him his last name. Isak gave Jonas his last name back. So that they could find each other on Facebook later.

One half of his brain is telling him very clearly that there was no way that Jonas Vasquez from Cuba could possibly be real, because the moment someone else walked into the room he disappeared faster than Isak could say boo, leaving no trace of him behind except for in Isak’s memory. The other half of his brain is telling him he has to check, because what if? He reaches over to where his laptop is resting on the bedside table, opening it up and pulling up Facebook.

He tentatively types in the name, _Jonas Vasquez,_ to the search bar at the top, narrows it down to Havana, Cuba on the side bar and clicks on the first result.

And there he was. The face of Jonas Vasquez, the boy that he saw in the bathtub, was staring back at him from the pixels of his computer screen. His arm was slung around another girl, his face broken out in a massive grin and he had a beer in his hand. The happiness in this photo radiated out to Isak, and the longer that he stared at it, completely transfixed, the more Isak knew that the Jonas Vasquez on the screen was the same Jonas Vasquez that he had seen in the bathtub.

But as Isak stares more at Jonas Vasquez, scrolls down his Facebook feed and absorbs as much information about himself, the weirder the feeling inside him gets.

The logical part of his brain was back again, this time regurgitating what the schizophrenia Wikipedia page had said about hallucinations, that he probably saw this boy somewhere else on the internet and as part of his delusion he conjured up an image of a boy from Cuba he’d seen once before with a tiny bit of information that his brain had stored away in a back corner somewhere.

And so Isak looks for a crossover between the two of them, a moment where the two of them have at least been in the same country. He finds Jonas Vasquez’ instagram too, jonas9000, and scrolls through that looking for something.

There aren’t any photos on his Instagram of Norway though, and the Instagram photos go back a good five years. There are photos of him travelling though, to countries like the USA and Mexico, where Isak has never been. Isak scrolls down all the way to the first photo Jonas Vasquez ever put up on Instagram, but there doesn’t look like there’s ever been a time where the two of them were on the same continent, let alone in the same country.

A feeling of restlessness settles back over him, as he debates with himself whether Jonas Vasquez was really in that bathtub with him or not. He collapses back down on the bed, shoving his laptop to the side and rubbing his face with his hands.

It takes him a while to work it out however, as it always does when he sorts through his feelings and emotions, but the restlessness he’s feeling actually isn’t restlessness at all. The seed of doubt had been planted in his mind now, and it was growing, because what he was feeling was actually familiarity, like seeing Jonas Vasquez in a bathtub when he was halfway around the globe was supposed to be something regular in his life.

When Eskild comes back into his bedroom, a steaming mug of hot chocolate in his hands, Isak lets him sit up next to him and boots up a shitty movie which requires no brain power to pay attention to. He tries to focus his mind on that and not on Jonas Vasquez, wondering halfheartedly about how long he can put off seeing a doctor about this. He grips the mug of hot chocolate so tightly that his knuckles turn white, the feeling of familiarity seeming to cling to his bones and not let go. It’s starting to coax him into thinking that maybe it’s not schizophrenia, that maybe what is happening is something else.

Eskild can feel his stress. “It’ll be fine, baby Jesus,” he coos softly, his arm moving out to fold around Isak and to draw him closer. Isak moves willingly into Eskild’s space, something he would normally never let himself do, and draws as much love and warmth as he can from the other man. What does he have to lose from that now?

“Everything always works out fine.”

 

-

 

Isak’s never really been a fan of school. It’s not challenging anymore, even though his boredom makes him do the work. He doesn’t really have any friends either, so there’s no real motivation to get up and go.

But now, it’s a distraction from everything that’s going on in his head. The idea is kind of rooted in his head now, that his future away from school which was the only thing he was looking forward to will actually result in him turning out like his mother, committed in a home with supervised visits on Sundays.

He’s standing in the Nissen courtyard, Elias next to him chattering away about a party happening this weekend. Isak doesn’t want to be paying attention to anything that Elias has to say, but he is at school and there is a facade to maintain.     

There are a couple of girls with them, each hanging onto his every word, waiting for him to say something funny so that they can laugh and flirt with him a little more. He dodges another one of their attempts, staring out at the people who are occupying the Nissen courtyard with him.

And across the courtyard, _he_ crosses.

Isak blinks slowly, staring at him, tuning out Elias entirely. He looks like he’s just walked straight out of a high school movie, a cigarette tucked behind his ear, his hair perfectly styled in that messy way that looks like it took thirty seconds but really took thirty minutes. With a letterman jacket hanging over his shoulder and stupid sunglasses resting on the bridge of his nose, this boy is checking every box in the list titled _Isak’s type_.

The boy ends up leaning against a brick wall, the cigarette moving from his ear to dangle loosely from his lips, as he blatantly stares at Isak, who right now is trying his best to keep the blush off of his face. Isak can’t stop staring at him back, which is the biggest issue. The moment he makes eye contact with Isak, that’s when he realises that he has no hope at all.

His blush crawls down his neck, but even with the butterflies in his stomach and Elias’ presence beside him, he can’t bring himself to look away. The boy then has the nerve to smile at him and then to wink, which sets Isak’s whole body alight.

Somehow, he knows that even with the boy looking like the coolest thing Isak has ever seen that there are just as many butterflies in his stomach as there are in Isaks.

Elias nudges him, breaking Isak out of his trance. “Never thought you would be one to get it up for the girls Isak.”

Isak looks back to the boy again, but in his place is a girl now, a nice looking girl with blonde hair. He darts his eyes around to see if he can see the boy again, but he is gone, out of Isak’s sight. He’s glad that the person who has replaced the boy was a girl though, because that makes Elias think that he is interested in them.

“Fuck off Elias,” he says, jabbing him back. Elias just laughs, and the illusion that Isak was under was gone now, and he is back to real life, pretending to be someone that he isn’t.

He sighs, laughs along with something that one of the girls said, and tries to get the pretty boy with the cigarette out of his mind.

 

-

 

When he’s in the middle of what could be the most important exam of his entire school career, the whole hallucination thing happens again. It may only be the midterm biology exam, but if he’s sick or something on the day of the final then the grade that he gets on this is what will make it or break it for university next year. The pressure to do well is immense, but it has nothing on the other pressure that is in Isak’s life.

Studying for this exam has been his procrastination from everything else, including thinking about his future. It’s easy to lose himself in the rigidity and the rote learning that comes along with biology.

But every other waking moment, where he isn’t learning about the chemical composition of the vacuole, the idea that he might have schizophrenia will not leave his head. Stress is the biggest trigger for episodes, he knows that, so it’s taken all of his will to try and keep himself calm this week, in between the studying and Elias being a dick and Eskild hassling him for rent money that he doesn’t have.

He goes through the motions of starting an exam basically on autopilot, sitting down at his assigned desk and listening to the woman at the front run through the rules, some of which are obvious and annoy Isak for no other reason than people should have enough common sense to know. Another woman comes around, hands out four separate booklets and a piece of blue paper with the multiple choice answer bubbles on it. The woman at the front teaches them how to circle in the bubble. Isak feels rather patronised.

When the clock being projected onto the screen hits 9 am, there is a sudden flurry of papers rustling as everyone opens a booklet and gets started. Isak does what he always does; flips open the multiple choice booklet and starts there.

  1.   _According to the induced-fit model for enzyme action, an enzyme changes shape:_
  2. _When it binds to the substrate_
  3. _And therefore it can work with many different substrates_
  4. _To be the same as the shape of its substrate_
  5. _To fit closely to the active site on the substrate_



He thinks it’s D, so he just colours in the bubble and moves on to the next question.

“You’re wrong.”

He looks up sharply, ready to shush whoever told him he was wrong so that he doesn’t get in trouble. Instead, he’s faced with an pissed off Muslim girl who he has never seen before, towering over him with her hands on her hips. Part of him feels like she could squash him like a bug, and the other part feels like he knows this girl already, like she’s someone important to him, even though he knows that he’s never seen her before in his life.

Isak opens his mouth but she places a finger on his lips to quiet him before he can say anything. She raises his eyebrows at him, shooting him a look that says _you’re an idiot_ very clearly. “You need to come out of your body before you say anything, or else they’ll hear you.”

Isak’s heart stops. She isn’t an exam student at all. She isn’t even here. This girl, standing over him, is another hallucination.

She rolls her eyes at him again, and Isak can feel her exasperation with him radiating across the desk in between them. “You have no idea, do you? I’m not a hallucination in your head or anything, alright? You’re not schizophrenic.”

His heart begins to race even more at that, his palms going sweaty and his skin going clammy. In all of his research he’s never read about a hallucination that was self-aware before, and it’s the not knowing part that scares him more than the self-aware part. And she has to be a hallucination too, because how else would she know exactly what he was thinking? Isak stares down at his paper again, before looking back up at her. When she sees the terror in his eyes, her whole demeanour softens.

“I’m your first aren’t I?” Isak doesn’t know what she’s asking, but the girl moves on before he has a chance to ask. “Just shut your eyes and concentrate on standing up.”

Even though he probably shouldn’t be listening to someone who he still thinks is a hallucination in the middle of his mid-year biology exam, he still does it, squeezing his eyes shut and pretending he’s standing up. When he opens his eyes however…

“Holy fuck!”

He’s actually standing up, looking down at his body. To an outsider, it would look like he was sleeping in his midyear, and Elias who is two seats to the side of him is now looking at his body and sniggering.

Isak doesn’t even register what he does next, pushing through the rows to get to where Elias is. When he’s standing in front of him he waves his hand in front of his face, waiting for a reaction. The kicker comes when Isak tries to take the pen out of his hand, because Elias doesn’t even seem to feel it, just turning back to his exam and trying to keep on writing.

The lack of reaction by anyone in the room makes Isak’s head start to spin, and he looks back over at the girl who is now sitting in his chair, replacing his body. She looks to be working through the exam now, twirling the pen around in her fingers.

Isak walks back over to her, feeling weird about the fact that he isn’t panicking anymore. “How the fuck am I doing this right now?”

“You’re projecting. Your consciousness is outside your body,” the girl says, not looking up from his exam. Isak moves around so that he can peer over her shoulder, looking at all the changes she has made.

“You changed my answer!” he says indignantly. She looks up at him with a pointed look.

“You were wrong. It’s not D. It’s A.”

“But it has to be the same shape!”

“How does it know before it makes contact with the active site, hm?”

“Bullshit! It’s got to be D because… because…” The argument dies on his lips, because in quarreling with her Isak has realised that the answer is actually what the girl said it was and not what he thought it was originally.

The girl’s demeanour immediately changes upon realising that Isak’s silence is actually an admission of his defeat. She smiles cockily at him, pursing her lips. “Exactly. It’s A.”

“Whatever.”

The girl moves onto the next question, but this time she hesitates. “It’s B,” Isak supplies when the silence between them stretches on too long. The girl takes another moment to consider his answer, making Isak roll his eyes and then explain himself.

They work through the rest of the multiple choice questions like that, but then hit a snag when they reach the short answer questions.

“Maybe you should write out our answers.”

Isak raises his eyebrows at her. “ _Our_ answers?”

“Well we’re working on it together aren’t we?”

He has to concede at that, because they’ve just spent the last half hour of this three hour exam working through the twenty multiple choice questions in the first booklet. The two of them switch places now, so that Isak is sitting at the desk and Sana is standing next to him.

They spend the next two and a half hours like that, debating every little thing the exam throws at the two of them. Even though what they are doing could technically be called cheating, the girl draws the cheating line in the sand very clearly when she denies Isak’s request to just Google the answer to one of the questions that they both don’t know.

The girl leaves the exam hall with him, walking side by side with him out into the chilly air of Oslo. He doesn’t feel cold though. Instead, a sticky humidity clings to his skin. The girl on the other hand looks overjoyed to finally be in cold weather.

Before he can turn and talk to the girl, Elias comes bounding out of the door, leaping onto his back. It takes all of Isak’s willpower to make his knees not buckle under the pressure. “Someone didn’t get a good enough sleep last night, hm?”

“Fuck off, I was stressed about this,” Isak retorts, making the girl next to him shoot him a look.

Elias spins around so that he’s walking backwards in front of Isak, reaching out to pinch his cheeks. “Widdle Isak cares about his widdle grades, does he?”

“Maybe if you cared about your grades too you might not have to repeat next year,” Isak shoots back, but the impact of it is lost because Isak can’t meet Elias’ eyes.

“You want me to repeat next year, because that way you’ll at least have a friend in your own year,” Elias laughs mockingly. Isak’s cheeks burn with embarrassment.

“Elias!” one of his friends call from where they’re standing over by the gate.

“Sorry pal, gotta blast,” Elias says to Isak, offering him a mock salute, before jogging casually over to his friends with a wild grin on his face. He looks up from the ground at the girl next to him, who is radiating disapproval but is otherwise saying nothing on what she just witnessed.

She turns to him abruptly, her eyes wide with remembrance. “Before you start speaking, put your earphones in so it looks like you’re on the phone to someone. It looks a lot better than just talking to thin air.”

Isak obliges her request, slinging his bag over one shoulder so it sits on the front of his body and digging through his front pocket looking for his headphones. He only puts one headphone in, even though he would probably be able to hear her the same if he had them both in.

They wander for a while in silence, Isak opting not to take the tram to try and prolong their walk, giving him more time to formulate the questions he wants to ask her. Because he has so many he needs to ask, and they’re all flying around in his head at a million miles an hour, all jumbled up into one tangled emotion labelled confusion.

He starts with the first question in his head. “You really know what you’re doing with this, don’t you?”

“I’ve had practise.” She pauses. “Who else have you met?”

Jonas is the first name that springs into his head, because after the last three hours of his life he’s become more sure that he wasn’t a hallucination at all. “Uh... Jonas?”

She rolls her eyes. “Jonas, of course. Well, hi, my name is Sana, I’m from Marrakech, which is in Morocco, and I’m a part of your cluster.”

“Cluster?” The word is unfamiliar on his tongue, which makes Sana look at him strangely.

“Didn’t Jonas explain it to you? I explained it to him.”

“No? We kind of just smoked weed in a bathtub and talked about girls.” His throat burns as he says it. He knows what assumption Sana will draw from that, and even though he wants her to think that, a part of his heart still hurts.

“Typical.” Her casual disapproval hurts even more, but he brushes it off again. There’s a pause before she launches into the explanation of what is happening to him.“Well, it’s not just Jonas and I that you can see, but seven other people. We’re all like real people, but we have like a psychic connection.”

“I share my head with seven other people now?”

“Nine. Jonas, me _and_ seven other people.”

Isak’s eyes widen. “Fuck.”

She shrugs. “It’s not as bad as you think. We aren’t gonna like hang around you 24/7.”

Isak doesn’t respond. He doesn’t know how to. It already feels a little overwhelming, even with the small things that Sana is telling him. They walk a little more, giving Isak time to breathe and process the fact that there are _nine_ people in his head. Somehow Sana seems to know where she is going, because she is leading the way, turning down one of the hidden side alleys before Isak even gets to it.

“Why me? Why us?”

“Our birthday. We were all born on the 21 June 19–”

“99, at 21:21.” Isak finishes for her. “Holy shit.”

There’s another pause.“So what, everyone who was born at the same second somehow gets put into a… a psychic group?”

Sana shrugs. “I don’t know how it works really. It just kind of is.”

“Who else have you met?”

Sana shrugs again. “A few people.” She doesn’t elaborate, and as much as Isak wants to press her for names, he doesn’t, because her vibe is intimidating to say the least.

“So, what’s it like in Morocco?”

Sana shoots him a look. “Is that really your best attempt at small talk?”

“Sorry,” Isak shrugs. “I don’t really talk to new people very often.” The _new people I actually want to like me_ goes unsaid. Isak hopes she hears it anyway.

Suddenly, Isak can feel the dry heat on his skin, a stark difference from the cold that is in Oslo. They keep walking down the street, but now instead of it being the familiar route to the kollektiv, he is surrounded by a bustling metropolis, the setting sun casting yellow light over everything. Isak didn’t know what he expected Morocco to be like, considering he’s only ever been to European countries. He’s surprised at how familiar the movement feels.

“I’m going home from school now too,” Sana says simply. “You’re welcome to come with if you’d like?”

Isak frowns. “Is that weird?”

“Isak, you live in my head now,” she replies, rolling her eyes. “I bet you’ll be over there a lot more from now on. Anyway, you seem like the smartest person in our cluster, so who else am I going to revise with?”

Sana says it like its obvious, like now that they’ve bonded over one thing they can keep doing that and hope that the bonding thing sticks. Isak’s grateful for it, because setting the baseline means that they will always have something to come back to.

There’s a plate of bread and dips on the counter in the kitchen, and a man Isak assumes to be Sana’s father is sitting by it, absentmindedly eating while he scans the news.

“Hi Papa,” Sana says, dropping a kiss on his cheek. Her father lights up when he sees her, throwing his hands up dramatically and turning around.

“Ah, my favorite daughter. How was school, my dear,” he says brightly, pushing the plate of food towards her. Sana rolls her eyes good humoredly (Isak is coming to realise that rolling her eyes is her default reaction to almost everything) and then launches into a discussion about something that happened at school today.

The conversation doesn’t last long, but it’s enough for Isak to be reminded of his own feelings towards his father, about how Isak has never been enough for him. Sana catches on to his feelings of uncomfortableness quickly, but she doesn’t say anything, prevented by a boy who looks a little older than the two of them bounding into the room and snatching Sana up in a hug.

Isak’s always had daydreams about having a family like this. It hurts a lot more to see it play out in front of him.

“Hello little sister! How was school!”

Sana shoots him an indignant look. “Hi Elias. How was sitting home squandering your life?”

Sana’s brother, Elias, places a hand over his heart in wounded affront. “Ouch, that hurts.”

Their father reopens the newspaper, ruffling his out and propping his glasses back up on his nose. “She’s right, Elias. When are you going off to university?”

“Why can’t you have goals like Sana,” Elias says mockingly. “Why can’t you be more like Sana?”

“It’s a hard burden to bear to be the perfect child, but someone has to do it,” Sana replies, taking the plate of dips and breads the three of them had been snacking on and walking airily out of the kitchen.

Isak follows her silently up to her room, climbing the stairs and walking down the hallway to her room. There’s a poster of Stephen Curry on one of her walls and a white rug in the middle of the room. The messiness of the desk and the unmade bed make the room look lived in, and Isak feels surprisingly comfortable and at home here. Maybe that’s because Sana feels that way too.

“Sorry about my family,” she offers up awkwardly. “We’re a bit liberal.”

“It’s okay,” Isak replies, not knowing how to put into words all the complicated feelings he has about families. Sana saves him from having to work it out by shoving a paper in his chest.

“I helped you, now you help me. Do you know much about mitosis?”

 

-

 

After Sana, there’s a lull. He has a routine now with her, on Tuesday’s and Saturday’s they study together for a few hours, because those are the times that they can do. Sana plays basketball for her school team, which she absolutely adores, but the day is coming soon where she will not be able to play basketball anymore, simply because no one wants to play with a woman in hijab.

He sees Jonas a lot more though, a lot more than he was expecting, because it’s very easy to hook up two XBOX’s to play co-op matches of FIFA together, no matter that there is an entire sea between them. Jonas hasn’t met anyone but him and Sana either, and neither of them know how to find the other seven people that Sana already knows.

More than once they’ve thrown around the theory that Sana hasn’t met them either, or that she made up the number in a panic and that it’s really just the three of them. But something in Isak’s heart twangs whenever the rest of his cluster is mentioned, a phantom pain tugging at his heartstrings, and he knows in his gut that the ten number is right, and that out there in the world there are seven other people who he’s going to have in his head for the rest of his life.

Isak has never had a best friend before, but neither has Jonas. Jonas is charismatic and funny and charming, and everything Isak doesn’t know how to be, so when Jonas confesses that to him it comes as a real surprise.

“Maybe I was just waiting for _the_ best friend, you know,” he whispered to the night, once while they both lay on Isak’s bed, talking about things that they haven’t really shared with anyone before. “The one that’s gonna be my friend for everything.”

“Yeah,” Isak agreed, because he knew exactly what Jonas meant. It’s every humans desire to want people to count on, who would be there for you no matter what, and Isak didn’t have many of those people yet.

The _maybe that’s you_ went unsaid, but Isak heard it anyway.

Jonas keeps flickering in and out of Isak’s living room, because the two of them are supposed to be playing FIFA together right now but Isak can’t stop himself from falling asleep. Jonas pushes him halfheartedly, but even now that’s not enough to startle some adrenaline into him to keep him awake.

“I can go bro, if you want to sleep,” Jonas offers, but Isak shakes his head sleepily.

“No, we gotta finish this tournament first.”

“Alright, if you’re sure.”

Isak had brought his duvet into the living room a while ago, and right now he is a duvet burrito, wrapped up tightly with his XBOX controller inside the cocoon. It’s down to the fact he’s played years of XBOX that he knows what he’s doing without even having to look at the controller.

And then a school bell rings, clear as day, and that’s enough to jolt the two of them up and get Isak’s systems all online.

He blinks once, twice, as his vision shifts. He’s still wrapped in his duvet, but this time he is sitting up with his head leaning against a bus window, staring at the city which is passing him by. Jonas’s familiar curly hair is in front of him, and he’s stretched out along a double seat, looking back at Isak with expectant eyes. The two of them look around the bus, but the only person that acknowledges their presence is the boy sitting next to them, gaping at them with his mouth open wide.

“Who the fuck are you?” The boy says, reaching out to take his headphones out. Isak reaches his hand out to stop him.

“Oh uh, keep your headphones in,” he says to the boy, remembering what Sana told him the first time this happened. “People will think you’re on the phone.”

“Why the fuck do people need to think I’m on the phone? I’m talking to you, you’re right there?”

“He’s not,” Jonas adds unhelpfully. Isak shoots him a look. “We both aren’t.”

“Have you met anyone yet?” Isak asks, trying to keep himself calm. When the boy gives him a funny look that clearly says _are you on drugs_ , Isak aborts the keeping himself calm thing and surrenders to the panic.

Because fuck. This boy obviously has no idea what is going on which means that hasn’t met any of the cluster yet and that means that Isak sitting there in his pajamas swaddled in his doona and Jonas who looks slightly more put together than Isak but not by much are the first people that this boy would have ever seen.

Isak feels like he’s way out of his depth, because he hasn’t had to do that for someone before. Sana, with her resolute calm and stoic way of handling everything, she’s the sort of person that this boy needs. She knew exactly what to do with Isak, how much information to give him at once so he didn’t panic and when to give him a break to process it all.

What this boy doesn’t need, is Isak freezing right now and scaring him away so he never speaks to his cluster again. The only redeeming factor about this is Jonas sitting on the bus seat in front of him, grinning wildly at the boy.

“I’m Jonas,” he says, holding out his hand for the boy to shake before aborting the action. “Actually don’t shake that, people will think you’re weird for shaking the air.”

Isak opens his mouth to talk, but because he surrendered to the panic before all that did was allow it to increase exponentially. Jonas picks up on that immediately, turning to face him.

“Do you need a moment to breathe?”

Isak nods. “Give me like five seconds, okay?” Isak mumbles, looking down at his hands.

He takes a deep breath, pushes at the space in his mind and makes the school bus disappear. The panic in his chest begins to subside now he’s out of there, but he also knows that he can’t just leave that boy there to go through the same thought process he had a week ago.

He’s never been more thankful for Jonas in his life.

Isak takes a moment to just concentrate on his breathing, in and out and in and out, until at least that’s under control. After that, it is easy to just let go of all the rest of the panic as he focuses on thinking about nothing at all for a few seconds.

It doesn’t take him long before he’s looking in the back of his mind for the space that the boy occupies, pushing at it lightly to get his entire world to shift. The boy is no longer on a bus. He’s sitting on a bench in front of a bus stop now, his head resting in his hands. Jonas is sitting next to him, his hand resting on the boys back, and his head is bent so that he can whisper to the boy and him only.

Isak tentatively makes his way over to the pair, purposefully trying to keep his footsteps light so neither of them hear him. However, that doesn’t really make much of a difference, because the moment his first step hits the pavement they both look up, staring at him.

Jonas is the first one to react. “This is Mahdi, and we’re in Chicago.”

Isak’s eyes widen. “America! I’ve never been to America before.”

“Where are you from?” Mahdi asks softly.

“Oslo. Norway.” Straight after he finishes talking, Mahdi shivers, an icy breeze flowing down the pathway. “It’s -9 right now,” he offers up in explanation.

“That’s better than here. It’s 7.”

The thing that is constantly surprising Isak, now as he meets the third member of his cluster, is the awkwardness that seems to be following them all around.

“Can I see everyone like this?”

“Like everyone in the world?”

“Yeah.”

“No,” Isak says definitively. “Just the people who are born on June 21.”

Mahdi raises his eyebrow. “So like, everyone in the world who is born on June 21?”

Isak immediately backtracks. “No! No, god no. I think there’s like ten of us? Maybe? I haven’t like met everyone yet so I could be wrong.”

“Then how do you know it’s ten?”

“We don’t.” Jonas says simply. “But one of the girls in our cluster, Sana, she told us there was so we’re trusting her.”

“Cluster?”

“That’s what we’re calling our little psychic group thing.”

“Fucking hell,” Mahdi says, running a hand over his head and leaning back against the back wall of the bus stop. “Fucking hell.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Jonas adds, leaning back with him and leaving Isak standing awkwardly in front of the two of them. He’s sans duvet now, but he’s still dressed in his pajamas and clutching an XBOX controller in his hands. He can hear the FIFA music faintly in the back of his head now that he’s concentrating on it a little more.

“JONAS!”

The FIFA music is immediately drowned out by Jonas’ mother’s voice, as she storms down the street to him. “Did I not tell you to pick up your uniform and tidy your room last time I came in here?”

Jonas’ mother is a lovely woman named Aleja, sweet and loving but also hardy and disciplined. She slaps Jonas once around the ears, making him wince. “Clean it.”

The street fades away to leave them all standing in Jonas’ room, which makes Mahdi’s eyes widen with amazement. Isak suddenly has a deep feeling of deja vu of the time when he met Jonas for the first time, because of the way Mahdi is so genuinely amazed at all the things that he can now see and touch and hold.

“This is where you live?” Mahdi asks Jonas, looking around some more and trying to take it in.

Jonas chuckles. “As long as you concentrate a little, it’s not going to go away.”

“Holy shit,” he says wistfully, jumping up on Jonas’ bed and stretching out. Suddenly, his face lights up. “Hold on, you speak Spanish! Does that mean I speak Spanish too now?”

Jonas frowns. “I guess? Why?”

“I’m almost flunking out of it. Wanna help me cheat?”

Isak can’t help himself. He laughs.

 

-

 

He may have had to survive on his own for a while and take care of both himself and his mother, but even with that life experience Isak still has no idea how to cook. When he needed something it was always microwave meals and take away, the convenience saving him from stressing over another thing.

The kollektiv’s fridge is packed full of vegetables and fruits and ingredients that when combined obviously make something delicious, but Isak has no idea how to combine them to make that delicious something and at midnight he really doesn’t have the desire to find out whether he can or not.

He rummages around in the cupboards for anything else that he can make quickly to satisfy his late night hunger pains, and comes up with slightly stale white bread and an almost finished pot of strawberry jam, which is good enough for him. He goes through the motions of putting it in the toaster, finding a knife, waiting around on his phone for it to pop, the whole shebang. He doesn’t notice anything until he puts the toast in his mouth and takes a bite, but instead of the sweet taste of strawberry jam, his mouth is violently assaulted with one of the worst tastes he has ever had in his mouth.

He turns around and immediately spits it out into the sink, rinsing his mouth with tap water to try and get the taste of it out.

“Sorry, I like a shit load on my toast.”

He turns around looks up to see a girl sitting on the counter, swinging her legs. Her words are garbled because of the piece of toast which is shoved in her mouth. Said piece of toast is covered in a thick black sludge which doesn’t even look edible. Isak gags slightly at the smell.

“How the fuck can you eat that?” He says, trying not to think about the lingering taste of the black sludge in his mouth.

“Honestly I have no idea. Probably because I was raised on it? You know it’s made of the stuff that’s left over when you make beer?”

“That is the most disgusting thing I have ever put in my mouth.”

The girl just laughs at him, rolling her eyes..

“Hi, I’m Eva and just like all self-respecting Australians I fucking love Vegemite.”

“That black sludge has a name?” he says incredulously. Eva laughs at him again.

“God yeah, it’s so popular in Australia. It’s sold literally everywhere. You have to have it on toast, and like on the shittest white bread you can find. I like a lot of it, but I have a major tolerance for the stuff. Vegemite virgins like you should start off with the tiniest amount and a shit load’a butter.”

“Let me tell you, I am never _ever_ eating that stuff again. It’s disgusting,” he hisses at her. She grins back.

“Well, let me make you a piece, you can try it again and then you can say if you’re never gonna eat it ever again or not.”

He narrows his eyes at her, but nods suspiciously, much to her delight.

“Why are you making toast anyway? Is it late in Australia right now?”

“No no, it’s early. About nineish. I’ve got work at ten so I’m about to leave.”

“Where do you work?”

“Maccas.”

“Maccas?”

“Oh fuck, uh, McDonalds. Like everyone calls it maccas though.”

“That’s cool.”

For some reason, that response garners an exasperated eye roll from her. “Why does everyone always think Australia is so cool? Seriously, there’s nothing here except for racists and bogans. Plus, where I live, we doesn’t even have any famous people.”

“But like Hugh Jackman? Chris Hemsworth?” Isak says, his brow furrowed. Eva shrugs.

“No. Hugh Jackman is from Sydney and Chris Hemsworth is from Melbourne.”

“You’re not from Sydney or Melbourne?”

“No. Not every Australian lives in either of those two cities.” Suddenly, a wild grin breaks out over her face. “I bet I can guess where you’re from.”

Isak, never one to back down from a challenge, immediately accepts. “You’re on.”

“Seriously though, literally no one has ever heard of where I live.”

Isak thinks for a second about the geography lessons he had in school when he was a child, which he mostly tuned out of and probably didn’t cover Australian cities. “Your capital city which isn’t Sydney or Melbourne?”

“Canberra? No, no I’m not from Canberra either.”

He tries to wrack his brain for more places, but eventually comes up empty handed. “Fuck I'm out of Australian cities,” Isak says, throwing his hands up in the air in defeat. “Where do you live?”

Eva, the little bitch, has the gall to now laugh at him. “I told you you wouldn’t get it. I’m actually from Adelaide. It’s like down the bottom in the middle, if that makes sense.” She pulls out her phone from her back pocket and unlocks it. After a while, she turns it around to show Isak, a map of Australia pulled up. “It’s right here.”

There is a little dot on the bottom middle of the map, just as she said there would be. “Never heard of it.”

Eva smiles wryly. “No one ever has.”

“I’m sure there’s like one famous person from Adelaide. There’s gotta be someone.”

“There’s Sia?”

Isak’s head quirks in curious amusement. “The singer?”

“Yeah.”

He shrugs, throwing his hands up. “Well there you are, you have a famous person.”

Eva pushes herself down from the “So where are you, mystery man in my head?” she says, taking another bite of her toast. Yet again, Isak has to resist the urge to gag due to the aftertaste of it that currently occupies his mouth.

“It’s Isak. And welcome to Oslo I guess. Even though you’re not really here.”

“Fuck that’s cool.” Eva moves over to the kollektiv window to stare out of it and onto a bustling Oslo street below her. She turns back to him, grinning. “Honestly, this cluster thing is the coolest thing that has ever happened to me. I’ve never left Australia before.” She pauses. “That’s not true I've been to Bali. But Bali doesn’t like count. Every Aussie goes there.”

“That’s cool. I’ve never really been outside Scandinavia. I did go to Paris once on a school trip though. And Spain.”

“Okay, now that’s cool. In Australia, school trips are like eight hour drives north to go camping and look at rocks. Going to a different country is wildly expensive.”

The toaster pops in the background, exposing a piece of shitty, half burnt toast. The kollektiv kitchen around him morphs into an open planned one, with large windows and a marble countertop. Isak looks around to see a living room with cream couches and a dining room with extravagant chairs which somehow match the sofa without being the same colour. The whole room screams extravagance, and he looks back at Eva with a weird expression on his face.

She laughs wryly. “I go to a girls school, which means my mum is competing with all the mums there to be the best at literally everything. One of those things is interior design. We aren’t like rich or anything. It's just like a thing.” She turns around to him, handing him the toast. “Here you are, one piece of toast for the Vegemite virgin.”

The toast is not as black as Eva’s was. In fact it’s not even close. The black sludge is mixed with butter, a lot of it, diluting the black to something more on the yellow side. He tentatively takes a bite of it, expecting the disgusting taste from before.

But actually, it’s pleasant. It’s still salty, but just salty enough, a nice salty. “Oh shit, that’s actually not that bad.”

Eva crosses her arms over her chest, leaning back against the counter with a smug grin illuminating her face. “I fucking told you so! Every foreigner always says Vegemite sucks but really it’s because they’re not fucking eating it right. It’s not like every other spread. A little goes a long way.”

Suddenly, Isak’s face breaks out into a grin. “In revenge for that first shit though, I am making you try surströmming.”

Her smile droops slightly, her eyes narrowing. “What the fuck is that?”

He grins at her, much to her chagrin. “You’ll see.”

 

-

 

His mother has been in a facility for five weeks now, and every Sunday Isak has stood out the front of it and paced for a while, trying to muster up the courage to go in but never actually succeeding. Even though what he thought were hallucinations turned out to be the greatest people in his life, there was still always going to be that small fear in the deepest recesses of his mind that maybe one day he could be.

Now with nine other people sharing his head, even though he doesn’t know all of them yet he’s still scared that one day his own mental health could affect them negatively, that his experiences could transfer onto them. With something as dangerous as schizophrenia, that could have incredibly negative effects.

He’s leaning against the wall across the street from the actual facility, scrolling through his texts in the naive hope that he might find something that Eskild left him to do that would alleviate his guilt for leaving. There’s a boy next to him, scanning each person that walks past like he’s waiting for someone.

The more time that goes past, the more aware of the boy next to him Isak becomes. When the two of them have been standing next to each other for more than twenty minutes, that’s when Isak wonders if maybe the boy isn’t supposed to be a stranger to him at all, but someone in his cluster.

His mind is jolted away from that thought however by an elderly lady being escorted into the facility by a young girl, his stomach welling up with guilt about how he should be in there with his mother helping her.

Almost as if he’s reading Isak’s mind, the boy immediately turns around to face him, his face displaying a look of concern. “Do you want me to come in with you?”

Isak can’t stop the question from tumbling off of his lips. “Are you in my cluster?”

“Uh yeah… I thought you knew that?” The boy says, frowning. Isak feels like a bit of an idiot right now, but at least that explains how he read Isak’s mind before.

“No?”

He rolls his eyes at Isak, moving a little closer. “I’m Magnus. Germany. You must be Isak.”

“How did you know?”

Magnus huffs a laugh. “You’re actually the last person in the cluster I have to meet, so power of deduction I guess.”

Isak’s attention is drawn away from Magnus by the old lady and the young girl again, now out in the front garden and sitting on a bench. The old lady doesn’t look like she’s all there, but the young girl doesn’t seem to mind, pointing out something that Isak can’t see.

Magnus looks between Isak and the garden, trying to puzzle out what Isak is looking at. “Who’s in here?”

“My mother.”

Magnus’ face crinkles up in innocent confusion. “Then why are you scared of going in?”

Isak doesn’t know how to explain all the things that happened when he still lived with his mum, but Magnus’s words make all the memories rise up in him before he has a chance to stop them. The cut under his eye from the plate begins to sting again, and his hand rises up instinctually to touch it, even though it has long since healed without leaving a scar behind.

“Okay yeah, that sucks, but that shouldn’t stop you from going in though. She’s here to get help, so there are people here who can help you if she gets violent like that. When my mum did this whole thing too, she’d been like off her meds for ages, and the first thing they did was they made her take her meds, and after that she got more stable and she got better. The hardest pill to take is the first apparently.”

Isak turns his head around to look at him. “You have a crazy mum?” he asks incredulously.

“She’s not crazy, she’s bipolar,” Magnus states back, like that answer was the most obvious one. “Anyway, I can come in with you if you want? Or I can make you go in? Whatever you need, dude.”

Isak’s thoughts suddenly get stuck on something else; the start of what Magnus was saying before. “How did you know?”

“How did I know what?”

“About my mum.”

“Oh. You were projecting.”

“What?”

“It’s like… because we’re psychically connected and all that we can like see each others memories, especially when they’ve got like really strong emotions attached. Because you were feeling… a lot of things, I could see all the memories you were seeing too.”

Isak takes another deep breath, shutting his eyes and leaning back against the wall. There are many bad memories of him and his mother sure, but there are so many good ones too. The one time they went to the science museum and then got ice-cream after, the time that they snuck out to the roof of their building at two in the morning so Isak could look at the stars; before everything happened with his mother she was the most supportive person in his life.

Maybe it’s Isak’s turn to do the same thing. He just needs someone else to take the first step.

When Magnus immediately walks across the street after Isak thinks that thought, he realises how grateful he is for the cluster right now, even if he only knows four of them. Isak follows him across the road, and them follows him again up the garden path, all the way to the sign in desk in the front office.

When the secretary sitting at the front reads his name on the sign in sheet, she smiles broadly at him, disappearing around the corner to find someone else.

“You must be Mr Valtersen. Your mother talks about you a lot. We’ve all been expecting your visit.” The kindly nurse who comes back out with the secretary to greet him doesn’t mean anything by her words except for a polite greeting, but they serve as a reminder of the five weeks prior to this that he has spent pacing outside the front of this place.

“You’re here now,” Magnus whispers, walking alongside him. _He’s here now._

The nurse stops abruptly in the hallway, a closed door to her left. She turns to Isak and presses a little grey button into his hand. “Your mother is in there. Press this if you need a nurse, alright?”

Isak nods, and the nurse disappears down the hall again.

Now, it’s just him and Magnus left in the hallway, staring at the little 210 in gold plating on the door. Isak hovers his hand over the door handle, contemplating leaving and chickening out once more. He can feel panic rising inside of him, but before he has a chance to feed into it, Magnus pushes past him and opens the door, moving into the room.

His mother isn’t there, but it doesn’t take him long to spot her. She’s sitting out in the garden, visible through the sliding glass door on the other side. Her eyes are shut, as she sits there just basking in the sunlight of the day. Isak wonders halfheartedly if she’s cold, considering it’s negative six degrees out right now.

Before he knows it, he’s slid the door open and is leaning against the door frame. It’s cold out, but after spending half an hour pacing in the cold already it doesn’t feel any worse than it did before. Magnus is just as rugged up as he is, so he doesn’t look cold either.

He stands there for a while, not really conscious of time passing. His mother doesn’t open her eyes, but she does pat the empty space on the bench next to her. “Sit down, my son. You’ll get tired standing out in the cold.”

It takes all Isak has not to jump in surprise, because he had no idea that she knew that he was even there. Magnus, being ever unhelpful (or helpful, not that Isak would admit it), shoved him lightly in the back, forcing Isak to take the first step out the door to stop himself from falling. After that, it was a little easier to take the next one, leading him all the way out to sit next to his mother.

When he sits down, his stomach is alight with nerves and fear, but his mother immediately reaches out for his hand, clutching it tight in her own. “It’s good to see you. I’ve been waiting for you to come visit.”

Isak looks up at Magnus, who is leaning against the outside of his mother’s apartment now, his hands folded across his chest. He grins at Isak, who smiles hesitantly back, leaning back in the seat and letting the sunlight wash over him as it does his mother.  

 

-

 

He’s brushing his teeth before bed when he sees something out of the corner of his eye, the blur of white moving behind him. There’s a girl, a dancer, both behind him and reflecting in the mirror in front of him. She’s practising, dancing along to a sweet tune.

The whole image of where she is comes into focus the more he stares at her, all of the dancers behind her moving as one to showcase her in the front. Isak can tell that it’s her that’s part of his head people, and he smiles.

He spits out the toothpaste and rinses his mouth, thinking back to what Sana told him to do all those weeks ago, how to push himself into someone else’s space and make himself be a part of what they are experiencing. Keeping yourself in someone else’s space when they’re not concentrating too is a little more difficult, but Isak has had a lot of practise. He peers deeper into the mirror, looking at what is reflected back, until he is standing watching them all in a brightly lit dance studio, the backdrop of classical music soothing him.

It’s beautiful. He’s watching a ballet, something he would never have sought out to see in his own life. But here he is, watching the dancers move so gracefully around the dance studio, each movement perfectly in time with everyone around them, that he wonders why he’s never watched this before. Even without the bejeweled costumes, the lights and the staging, just the plain movement is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.

The dancer looks at him, not even hesitating in her movements. She smiles faintly at him, just continuing to move. Isak leans back against the mirror, transfixed at everything that is going on in front of him. He can feel the strain of her muscles, the effort it takes to make herself look as graceful as she is.

She’s dancing with someone else, a limber man who looks like he is only there to make her look better. There’s a faint pressure on his hips when the man beside her lifts her high up in the air, dangling her like a ragdoll. The dancer lands back on the ground lightly, her smile widening when she sees the pure awe adorning Isak’s face.

The man yells something at the dancers, something that Isak can’t understand, and the illusion is shattered, the dancer’s focus off of him and back onto her coach. He stares at himself in the bathroom mirror, continuing to brush his teeth, fighting to keep the grin off of his face. He understands now what Sana meant when she said that the cluster was a gift.

It’s later now. Isak can’t get the visual image of the dancer out of his head. He’s been trying to sleep now for almost an hour, but the way she

“You were thinking about me,” she says casually, too casually. Isak can sense the fear behind her words, although he doesn’t know why she would be afraid. She’s sitting cross legged on the end of his bed, back rigid and head held high, keeping a posture without even realising it.

A million excuses fly through his head, all of them a reflex that has been drilled into him by Elias and his casual homophobia. But everything other than the truth feels utterly exhausting, and so he settles with the truth instead.

“You were beautiful,” he says softly, laying his head back down on the pillow and relaxing out, a little bit further to the left than he usually would. He pats the space beside him, so that she lies out next to him, heads facing each other on the pillow.

“I’m Vilde,” she whispers.

“Isak,” he whispers back.

Isak’s thoughts are clear, as with Vilde next to him he finds that most of his worries have disappeared into the night. He can feel the way she is anxious, the way it is gripping to her bones and not letting her go. He can feel it as much as he would be able to if it was him that was feeling this way, so it’s the easiest thing to just let her curl up next to him and not feel so alone anymore.

It’s a lot easier to fall apart in the night. It’s a lot easier to be brave in the night.

“Are you okay?” he whispers. She nods her head slightly, smiling at him.

Isak reaches out to grab her hand, tangling their fingers together and squeezing hard. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to.

“It’s so hard,” she says, her smile shaking under the weight of the tears in her eyes that threaten to fall. “I feel so alone all the time. I’m in a company, the best company, I gave up _everything_ to be here and now I’m doing what I love every day of my life so why do I feel so alone?”

“Me too,” Isak whispers. His chest tightens at the admission, because he’s never told anyone that before.

“Can I stay here tonight?”

“Of course.”

Isak has never had a girl in his bed before, not for anything. But Vilde doesn’t notice that, or she doesn’t care, because she very tentatively and softly lies down on top of the covers, curling in on herself so that she’s lying in the fetal position. Isak lies down next to her so that he’s looking at her.

“It’s going to be okay.”

“Okay.”

When Isak wakes up the next morning, Vilde is gone, but the memory of what he said last night still remains. He flips onto his back, halfheartedly wondering whether Vilde was breaking down because of just her, or whether half of what she was feeling was his burden too. Magnus had told him about projection before, so maybe

Everything that Vilde was feeling he was feeling too, the inadequacy and the feeling of being alone. Jonas and Magnus and Mahdi were making it a lot better however, but they were still people in his head. There was no one here in Oslo for him, except for Eskild and Linn, but that was different.

He stares up at the ceiling for a little longer, but then moves off his bed and starts the morning routine he’s so used to.

 

-

 

Standing in the middle of a crowd of people wearing a three day unwashed jumper and track pants with a red stain on the front of them, Isak has never felt more uncomfortable in his life. These people can’t see him and he knows that, or else they would have stopped and gawked already, because everyone surrounding him is dressed in lavish, skin tight dresses and perfectly tailored suits, each one of them looking impeccable.

Everything inside this room is more. There are more vases, more jewels, more unnecessary flashes of money and riches. From the crystal chandelier that hangs from the ceiling all the way to the marble floors, Isak has never seen this sort of extravagance in his life.

The anxiety in him just from being here is familiar, but something about it is off. It’s stronger than it should be, and it’s not going away no matter how many times he reminds himself that no one here can see him and that all he is here is a projection from inside someone else’s head.

When he looks up and makes eye contact with the beautiful blonde across the way however, Isak finally picks that the anxiety he is feeling isn’t his own, but hers. The girl breaks the eye contact almost immediately, her entire demeanour changing as she mutters apologies to the people she was talking with before and breaks away from them, moving quickly out of his view.

Isak follows her through the crowd, slightly unnerved by the way he doesn’t have to push past any of the people.

He finds her alone in the kitchen, resting her hands either side of her bent head as she tries to catch her breath.

“You know I’m not–”

“Yes,” she shoots back, her voice clipped. “Yes I know.”

“Are you okay?”

“Fine.”

He feels like he’s intruding now, but before he can make an exit a man comes around the corner, a concerned look on his face. “Noora? Are you okay?”

The anxiety inside him spikes tenfold at the arrival of this man, and suddenly Isak can feel the ache of a bruise around her wrist, another on her inner thigh. Noora immediately straightens up, her entire demeanour changing. The smile on her face is fake, Isak can tell that the moment she adopts it. He wonders if the man across from him can see it too.

“I’m fine William, I promise. I just came in here for a breath of fresh air.”

He huffs exasperatedly, moving over to grab her wrist. Isak flinches when William’s hand makes contact with the bruises. “Come on, Noora,” he says firmly. “We have guests.”

The moment Noora moves through the door back into the room with all the fancily dressed people the kitchen she was in fades away back to Isak’s bedroom. He collapses on the end of his bed, taking a few heaving breaths to try and calm the panic that he feels.

But as panicked as he immediately becomes when he thinks about her, he can’t resist going for another look. So he ends up as a wallflower at the most extravagant party he’s ever seen.

Noora, although he knows is exactly his age, seems much older. She’s hosting a dinner party in Spain for the rich and famous; some of whom Isak recognises from the snapchat stories from magazines like Cosmopolitan and the Daily Mail. Her dress is exquisite, but the smile she has on her face is even more beautiful, her whole being alight with passion and wonder that is impossible to consider as anything less than genuine.

If Isak was just another guest here, and not someone occupying her head, he would think it was genuine too, and that all Noora has ever wanted was to host people and make them feel comfortable in her home.

But Isak can feel the panic that lights up inside Noora everytime William looks over at her, the fight or flight instinct that rises up and that she has to fight so hard to be rid of. Isak can feel the way the bruise on her shin lights up in pain every time she takes a step, and the resolve it takes to take a single step without flinching.

The two of them make eye contact over the sea of people again, and this time Noora doesn’t look away. She smiles instead, soft and genuine and so much more beautiful than the fake one that all these people see. Isak smiles back.

 

-

 

The train that Isak is currently on is almost completely deserted, which is surprising considering he’s travelling up to Bergen for one of the open days at the University of Bergen. He expected way more teenagers in his train compartment, but all he has is a single sleeping businessman.

That’s apparently what happens when you catch the night train.

Before he can make himself comfortable however, a girl starts moving through the compartments, scanning all of the seats like she can’t find an empty one. Isak stares at her for a second, wondering what she is seeing.

Suddenly, he is overcome with the urge to just try and see whether she is part of his cluster, force the train to change into whatever she is seeing. He looks up at the girl again, looks for one of the two empty spaces in the back of his head and pushes.

Nothing happens.

But when he tries again, the girl looks up at him with a startled look in her eyes. The moment their eyes meet, the train shifts into a bustling hub of activity, as everyone around him shuffles around and tries to find their seat.

Isak looks for the girl again, but she has been lost to the flurry of men in suits and women in pencil skirts, all of them holding briefcases. For a second he thinks he won’t be able to find her again, but then he remembers the empty train that he is on, and pushes himself back to the dark of the Oslo to Bergen express.

The girl is still there, grinning maniacally at him. He smiles back hesitantly, tracking her movements through the crowd of people that are both there and not there as she makes her way through the train carriage and down to where Isak is sitting.

“Sorry,” she apologises the moment she sits down. “Rush hour.”

“You have trains like this for rush hour?” Isak says, gesturing to the seats.

The girl laughs. “You’re in Osaka. We’re on the bullet train.”

Isak looks out the window, the only bright one in the whole train, to watch little houses and telephone wires roll by.

“Where are you?”

“I’m on the Oslo to Bergen Express train. Probably not as fast as your bullet train.”

The girl looks down at her phone quickly, tapping something in before looking back up at him. “So. Norway huh!”

Isak laughs a little at that. “You didn’t know where Oslo was?”  
“Nope,” she shrugs. “I know now though.”

The two of them sit in silence for a while before the girl holds out her hand. “I’m Chris. Welcome to Japan.”

“Isak. Welcome to Norway.”

 

-

 

He still hasn’t met the last member of his cluster. He’s seen everyone else so much more often now, but when he sees them it’s always Even did this or Even did that, something that oddly irritates him to no end. Maybe he’s just noticing it a lot more because he wants so desperately to meet the last person who will occupy his head.

He’s out drinking in some dingy club when he sees the boy again, the one who he saw walking across the courtyard that day. He’s sitting in one of the booths and sipping lazily on a drink. He’s sitting with some girls, his arm half resting on the back of the booth and half slung around one of them. He meets Isak’s eyes, lifting his drink in a mock salute. Isak avoids his gaze and orders another gin and tonic, his thoughts drifting back to the last cluster member.

“Were you just going to ignore me like that?”

Isak spins around to see the boy in question standing beside him. He’s even more good looking up close, his eyes bright and sparkling, which is a direct contrast to the darkness of the club. He sits down on the stool next to Isak, taking the gin and tonic from his hands.

A part of Isak’s brain registers that he doesn’t wince as much as he should for the concentration of alcohol that’s in that and how fast he drinks it, but he doesn’t pay it any mind. Another part of Isak’s brain can feel the liquid burning as it goes down his own throat, sloshing and slurping. He ignores that too.

“Yes,” he says, putting his fingers up to signal the bartender for four more drinks, two shots of something and two more of whatever the nice drink with grenadine was. “I don’t exactly come here for socialisation.”

“Maybe you should. It would do you some good.”

“What would you know?”

The bartender puts the shots on the counter in front of him. Even takes one before Isak can move them out of his reach.

“Cheers?”

Isak halfheartedly meets the boy’s glass with his own, hearing the clink of the glasses against each other. They both down the drinks, Isak’s burn feeling stronger than it should. The cocktails come next, and usually sober Isak would be rejecting the idea of drinking a _girls_ drink by now, desperate to avoid doing anything that makes him look less than heterosexual. He has been sitting at this stool for a long time, long enough that he is very drunk, so that thought doesn’t even cross his mind.

“I’m Even, by the way,” the boy – Even – says, holding out his hand. Isak ignores it in favour of asking for another drink.

When Isak looks back at him, Even has a singular eyebrow raised. “Ignoring me? Now that’s a bit rude.”

“I’m here to get drunk,” Isak replies, his mood having done an entire 180 as it is prone to do when he drinks. “I’m done with smalltalk.”

“You’re drunk enough as is,” Even says, not unkindly. “Maybe you should think about packing up and going home?” The anger rises up inside him, at this total stranger for assuming that he has any idea why Isak is here.

“Don’t tell me what to do. Fuck you,” he slurs, his fingers slowly curling and tightening around the glass in front of him.

Before he knows it, he swings the drink round and pours it in Even’s face. However, the pinky orange slush doesn’t splatter onto Even at all, but a girl in a slinky, tight silvery dress who was sitting behind him.

“What the fuck!” she screams into his face, and that’s when all of the pieces in Isak’s drunk brain suddenly and very neatly fit together. The fact that Even hasn’t touched another person while he’s been in here, the way that he didn’t order his own drink but instead stole Isak’s and the way the alcohol burned more than usual as it slid down his throat.

Even was part of his cluster.

“Sorry, sorry,” he murmurs, using the last of his energy to hoist himself up and get the fuck out of there as quickly as he can. His drunken brain however, is not doing the best job of weaving him through the crowd, and the girl in the silver dress is fast catching up to him.

A hand closes around his wrist, and Isak’s stomach sinks. When he looks up however, it is not a bouncer like he is expecting, but Even.

“Come on,” he whispers, dragging Isak along. Even is a lot better at weaving through crowds of people, he notices, as they walk up the stairs to leave the club and end up out in the open air. He pulls them around a corner, and then another one, so that they are hidden from sight. Isak pokes his head around the corner to see silver dress girl storm out angrily, looking around for him. When she can’t see him, she stomps her foot and squeals angrily, her hands bunching up into fists. Not even a second later, two girls come around and crowd around her, ushering her away from where Isak can see her.

Isak runs a hand through his hair, and leans against the cold brick wall behind him to try and ground himself and calm his roaring head. He shuts his eyes for a moment, just breathing in and out.

“You’re… you’re in my head, aren’t you,” Isak says, opening his eyes and staring at Even, who is leaning against the other side of the alley wall right in front of him.

Even chuckles. “Yes, I am. It’s good to meet you. You’re the last person I’ve met actually.”

“No I’m not,” Isak says. “I saw you that day. In the courtyard.”

Even grins at him. “I’m surprised you remember that.”

Sober him would never allow himself to think these thoughts, but drunk him has no qualms thinking about how frankly gorgeous Even is. He’s all long legs and swagger and confidence, and in this moment, where Isak can’t be anything but honest with himself, Even is exactly the type of guy that Isak fantasises about.

Even’s face gives away no clues to whether he knows what Isak is thinking or not. Isak doesn’t really care. “Do you need help getting home?”

Isak can’t tell if he replies or not. Even takes that as an affirmative anyway, and swings his arm around Isak’s shoulders, drawing him in closer. He doesn’t move away.

Isak tries to guide them back to the kollektiv, but Even knows the way back just because Isak does, which means that he can let himself be lazily guided through the streets of Oslo. It’s never looked more beautiful than it does tonight, all blurry and hazy and stunning. Isak knows that it’s just beautiful tonight because of the company.

Something in him fires up at that thought, and he backs out of Even’s clutches quickly. At Even’s confused look, he reaches for his hand and tangles their fingers together. Even smiles delightedly at him, pulling him back closer as they stroll down the empty street languidly.

Sober Isak is going to hate himself for this, but Drunk Isak doesn’t care. It’s worth it to be close to Even.

As the effects of the alcohol begin to wear off however, Isak can feel the clutches of sleep begin to creep up on him. He collapses on the kollektiv’s stairs as Even punches in the code, swings open the door and rests against it to hold it open.

Isak pushes himself back up and through the door, leaning heavily on the bannister as he trudges heavily up the stairs. Even is on the other side of him, with Isak’s arm swung around his neck to support him on the climb up.

Something about the whole situation feels awfully domestic, as Even sits him down and forces him out of his jeans and shirt and into boxers and something more loose fitting. He hovers as Isak brushes his teeth, makes him drink a glass of water before finally tucking him into bed, lifting the covers so that they bundle around Isak’s neck.

Isak doesn’t want him to go. He wants him to stay for as long as he can, curl up into bed next to him and run his pretty fingers through Isak’s hair until Isak falls asleep. But even for Drunk Isak, who has no filter whatsoever, the idea of Sober Isak waking up with a boy, even one in his head, is the scariest thought he has had in awhile.

Even may not curl up next to him, which is what Drunk Isak desperately craves, but he does push off the pile of his clothes from Isak’s desk chair and pull a laptop out from somewhere, opening it up and beginning to type away. The last thing Isak remembers is the soft brush of lips against his forehead, as faint as a memory. He smiles.

 

-

 

His hangover is pounding in his head when he wakes up, curled up on the couch instead of in his bed. He thought that he ended up in his bed last night, but judging by the fact that he is most definitely not there, then maybe he didn’t after all.

He pushes himself up off of the couch, rubbing his eyes to try to adjust to the sunlight that is streaming through the windows. Isak is racking his brain to try and remember what happened last night, the memories not coming when he calls them.

He remembers starting his night with Eskild.

Because Eskild went out last night as well, which means he won’t be back until at least after midday, and Linn is most likely dead to the world in her room, which leaves no one but Isak in the house to make him breakfast. That leaves his options down to corn flakes, Doritos or whatever’s left over in the fridge, which upon further inspection turns out to be nothing at all.

Isak sighs, shutting the fridge door and moving on autopilot back to his room. He’s standing at the front of his door, about to turn the handle and retreat into his cave, when the crash of a frying pan in the sink startles him out of his stupor.

Even is in the kitchen. Even is moving around the kitchen, a saucepan in one hand and a spatula in the other, a cracked egg on the counter in front of him.

Isak moves slowly back into the kitchen, confusion with the hint of a smile on his face. “What… are you doing here?”

“Isak!” Even spins around, his whole face alight. “Sorry, I kind of hijacked your body, but you wanted breakfast, and I happen to make killer eggs.”

“Um, yeah sure, go ahead,” Isak says, pushing himself up so that he can sit on the kitchen counter next to the stove. There’s a weird feeling in his stomach, not just because of the domesticity of the idea that a hot boy is standing in his kitchen and making him eggs. It’s more that he was so out of it that he lost control over his body, leaving it open for one of the people in his head to kind of take over.

He trusted them, that wasn’t the issue. It just made him feel a little weird that someone did that.

Even picks up on it, turning around and rubbing his hair sheepishly. “I probably should have asked, huh?”

Isak shrugs, pursing his lips a little. “Wouldn’t have hurt.”

“Sorry then.”

“It’s okay. This whole thing’s a bit of a learning curve.”

He leans his head back against the cupboard and watches for a while as Even potters around the kitchen, gathering up this and that. Even though there was that little incident before, no tension remains in the air, much to Isak’s comfort. Even chatters mindlessly as he moves around, telling Isak all about this and that, about the annoying student in his second lecture on Tuesdays and how he won’t stop asking pointless questions and about the good blueberry pastry that the coffee shop he’s started working at sells and that he can’t stop eating.

It’s nice, the chatter. Isak has never really been one for small talk, but this doesn’t feel like small talk at all. Even though the conversation is about nothing at all, it still feels like it has meaning.

The small talk is good as well, because it keeps the dangerous thoughts out of his head, the ones that whisper about maybe replacing Emma in his head with Even, about taking him to a party, about making out with him in a dark corner. He blinks forcefully the moment that that visual pops into his mind, forcing it away and his attention back on the man himself, who is pottering around the kitchen, humming as he moves through the kollektiv kitchen and over to the fridge.

Even rummages around in the fridge for a second, resurfacing with a pot of something. When Isak realises what it is, his eyes widen. “Sour cream?”

Even shoots him a look as if he’s being stupid. “Well duh? A spoonful of sour cream makes scrambled eggs taste amazing. Trust me.”

Isak just rolls his eyes in return, turning down to his phone to read the latest headlines out to Even, who comments on one every now and then. Before he knows it, there is a spatula poking at his lips, covered in bright yellow eggy goodness. Isak opens his mouth on instinct, not looking up from his phone. The moment the taste hits his lips though, his entire brain short circuits.

The eggs are amazing. In his whole life of eating eggs, and he has eaten a _lot_ of eggs, mostly made by Eskild or his friends on mornings where he rocks up hungover, but none of them have been this good. Like Isak never doubted Even’s boasting about his eggs, but he was expecting just regular good eggs. Instead, he got Good Eggs.

“Holy shit,” he says in between his mouthful. “You really weren’t kidding.”

Even laughs at him, putting a plate in front of him with a piece of bread and the eggs on it, the eggs being lightly dusted with chives that Isak has no idea where they came from. A knife and fork appear next to the plate, and that’s all Isak needs before he begins shoving them down his throat like there’s no tomorrow.

“Not so fast, you’ll choke,” Even says, laughing. Isak ignores him.

Even pulls up a chair next to him at the dining room table, sitting down and stretching out, his body seeming even longer than usual. The morning sun is streaming in and lighting the kitchen up with a bright yellow glow. The way it hits Even’s cheekbones makes weird things happen in Isak’s stomach. He tries to ignore it by sparking casual conversation in between bites of his frankly orgasmic eggs.

“So, you work in a coffee shop? Like a Starbucks coffee shop or like a cafe coffee shop or what? Is that why you can make such good eggs?” Isak asks innocently, not expecting any reaction that would be out of the ordinary. Instead though, a blush springs up to Even’s cheeks and he looks down at his fidgeting hands.

“Well, uh, a coffee shop isn’t really a coffee shop in Amsterdam.”

Isak’s face screws up in confusion. “What do you mean?”

“Well, uh, if you ask for a coffee shop in English when you’re in Amsterdam, you’ll end up where I work. Which is a coffee shop. Which also sells weed.”

He takes another bite of his eggs and considers what Even is telling him. “So basically what you’re saying is you’re a drug dealer?” He smirks.

“I’m not a drug dealer!” Even says, affronted. “Well, I kinda am, but weed is mostly legal in Amsterdam so it’s fine.”

“Mostly? Isn’t Amsterdam like known for having legal weed?”

Even smiles wryly. “Contrary to popular belief, weed isn’t actually legal in Amsterdam. It’s kinda weird the way it works, but basically only coffee shops can sell it. Technically they’re not allowed to buy the weed either.”

“So all coffeeshops in Amsterdam are drug fronts, is what you’re saying?”

“Well, every coffee shop other than Starbucks. And Coffee Company. I think Coffee Company might be only Dutch.”

“Yeah, never heard of that one.” Isak takes another bite of his eggs. “So, as part of your drug dealer job thing, can you make coffee too?”

Even chuckles. “Yes, I’m also a licensed barista.”

“A media student who makes killer eggs and a half-decent coffee and also sells weed? You’re a bloody stereotype you are,” Isak says, placing his cutlery down on his plate and leaning back in his chair, placing his hands behind his head.

 _Also the man of my dreams,_ his traitorous mind thinks. He crushes the thought the moment that it rises up inside his head, desperate to stop himself from thinking that way again. He can’t allow himself to think that way.

A blush spreads over Even’s face, almost like he heard what Isak was thinking. Even laughs at him, fake offence on his face. “Excuse you, I am not a plain old media student, thank you very much. I am a film student with a real specialisation in directing.”

Isak’s stomach is still aflutter as he grins back. “You’re still technically a media student though.” He pauses for a second. “Hold on, if the cluster is all the same age, how are you a uni student if the rest of us are still in high school?”

Even pauses for a while, a flicker of something that looks like fear flashing quickly over his face. Isak narrows his eyes, but before he can call Even out on it he’s smiling again. Isak just lets it drop.

“I moved around a lot as a kid, and one of those stints was in Australia, which has a different school calendar year to like most of the rest of the world. So when I moved again, to a northern hemisphere school, I got put in the year above instead of going into my old year. Also Noora has finished high school too. I think the schooling system works different in Spain.”

Isak hums, considering it for a second, the questions whirring away in his head. Even can see it too, so he just sits back. “Why do you study film anyway?” He eventually settles on. When Even shoots him a funny look, Isak shrugs. “What? I’m curious?”

“It gives me control. I was never any good at writing my own stories, but when someone gives me theirs I can shape it and control it however I want, to tell a story on top of their story.”

Isak can tell that Even is more comfortable now, now he’s off of the previous topic and on to what is his passion in life, and whether he can tell that through a mix of the bond or of his body language or of both Isak doesn’t know.

Somehow, their conversation stays on film for a while, about what Even’s studies are like and all the stories he wants to tell. Even though Isak has never had an interest in film before, Even’s ideas and his passion is completely enthralling, and Isak finds himself engaged in the conversation without even realising it.

“-and I guess that’s why I like tragedies so much. The love just seems so much more grand, you know?”

“But it’s impossible for _all_ love stories to end in tragedy,” Isak says.

Even shoots him a confused look. “What do you mean?”

“There’s a parallel universe for every scenario you can think of, which means approximately a third of them would end happily. And this is where Isak is more comfortable, the theory which he spent hours researching as a kid to try and comfort him in the wake of the turning point in his life.

“There’s probably a parallel universe out there where you put smoked salmon on my eggs, or cooked me pancakes instead. There’s a parallel universe where you’re Norwegian too and we met at school or something. So if there’s a parallel universe where the love story ended in tragedy, that means that there has to be one where it ends happy too.”

“But a third? How could there be a third?”

“There’s not only happy or sad endings. The third third is for all the okay endings.”

“Infinite parallel universes where anything can happen,” Even sips his coffee, a wry smile dancing on his face. “I like that.”

Isak smiles back. “I like it too.”

The silence that settles over them is comforting, no pressure to talk or anything. They sit there, eating their eggs together. For the first time in a very long time, Isak feels completely and absolutely comfortable with the environment around him.

“Isak? Did you cook these?”

Eskild’s voice snaps him out of the trance that him and Even have found themselves in, and Isak looks over to see him peering over the pan of eggs, a spoon dangling from his lips.

“Uh,” Isak says, looking back at Even, who just grins at him. “I did?”

“Baby Jesus!” Eskild gasps, bounding over to him to cup his head between his hands and kiss him heavily on the forehead with a resounding smack. “You never told me you could cook?”

“Well, uh, I can’t really?”

“Then what’s that in the pan huh? And the bacon on the side, and the mushrooms and the tomato.” Eskild rolls his eyes. “I’m not stupid Isak. You can cook, and you’ve been hiding it from me.”

On the other side of the table, Even looks much more smug than he should be allowed to be. Isak wants nothing more than to hit the smile off of his face, but with Eskild standing right there there’s nothing more that he can do other than to grin and bear it.

“You should be cooking. Me and Linn have to do it. You should be doing it too.”

“Eskild, I already do the dishes every single night.” Eskild narrows his eyes, a clear sign that he isn’t buying it, forcing Isak to come up with a second excuse on the spot. “Plus, I have exams coming up really soon and I really need to be studying for them.”

Isak can tell that Eskild doesn’t believe his lie, considering he had his midyears only three weeks ago, but he lets the topic slide, retreating back into the kitchen. “We will talk about this later, Lune’s on the phone.” Eskild’s retreating footsteps abruptly stop. “Do you mind if I have the rest of your eggs?”

“Go for it,” Isak replies dismissively. The two of them wait for the scraping and the clanging from the kitchen to stop, but Isak doesn’t breathe a sigh of relief until Eskild slams his door behind him. Isak has never been more grateful for all of Eskild’s university friends.

“So, looks like you’re cooking now?” Even says, waggling his eyebrows. This time, Isak does lean over and hit him on the shoulder.

“If anything, you’ll be cooking. You got me into this fucking mess, you’re getting me out of it again.”

Even’s face breaks out into a grin. “Maybe I can teach you instead?” he says, tilting his head slightly. Isak’s stomach immediately breaks out with butterflies, and as much as he wants to say yes, to try and soak up more time with Even, he forces himself to decline.

“Maybe if Eskild actually makes me do it. He hasn’t put anything in concrete yet so….” Isak shrugs. “I’d rather not tempt fate.”

Isak has to be imagining the flicker of disappointment that flies quickly over Even’s face, which goes as quickly as it comes. He leans back in his chair, picking up his phone and scrolling through it quickly. Even doesn’t take his eyes off of him.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Isak’s stomach immediately bursts out into butterflies. “What?” he presses, which makes Even laugh and shake his head.

_You’re beautiful._

Isak recognises that Even doesn’t say it out loud, because he doesn’t see his lips move, but the sentiment comes across clear as day. It makes his heart race and the blush spring to his cheeks, going redder than he’s ever been before. When he finally gets the courage to look up at Even, he sees that he is just as red as Isak is.

“I didn’t–” Even begins, but the words die on his tongue. It’s very hard to deny something that Isak knows intrinsically is true, when he can feel the sentiment that Even is trying to convey down in his bones.

The two of them then settle into a weird silence, where Isak becomes increasingly aware of Even shooting glances at him. He stares down at his plate, trying to realise why that new piece of information unnerved him as much as it did.

When it clicks however, Isak can feel the embarrassment settle into his stomach. When Isak thought that Even was the man of his dreams right before this, he probably heard it the same way that he just heard what Even was thinking.

It’s not embarrassment that Isak is feeling now, although he did previously think it was. It’s turning into fear, bone deep and chilling, at the thought that someone in his cluster knew about the one thing he didn’t know how to put a label on yet.

He can’t meet Even’s eyes anymore, but Isak still knows that he is realising that he’s crossed an unestablished line. After that, Even offers up a rushed excuse to leave, saying something about how he needs to get ready for work, all to give Isak the space to freak out that he’s so desperately in need of right now.

Isak wasn’t expecting to immediately miss Even, but he does, the absence stark in his head. There’s a wall up between him and Even now, partly because of embarrassment on both their parts and partly because of Even trying to give Isak space.

Jonas notices the block first. He pops up in Isak’s room while he is halfway through his anger match on Halo. Isak is gripping the controller so harshly his knuckles have gone white.

“What the fuck happened between you and Even?”

Isak doesn’t look up at him. “Don’t want to talk about it.”

Jonas frowns. “Is it going to affect the rest of us?”

“No.”

“Right then, chuck me a controller.”

This is why Jonas is his best friend now, because he knows when Isak needs to talk about it and when Isak needs to be a typical teenage boy and repress all his feelings for a while while he shoots some things in a video game.

 

-

 

Isak doesn’t know how Even got his number, but three days later there’s a text sitting waiting for him. He smiles down at his phone, typing a text back.

Elias gives him a look from across the classroom, raising an eyebrow and sniggering to his friends. Even though Elias can’t see her, Eva gives him the finger back, which makes Isak have to stifle his laugh into his elbow.

 

> **hope we’re all good - even**
> 
> _of course we are_

 

-

 

Now that he has the cluster, Isak spends a lot of time thinking about his time before them and what he didn’t have before. All of the nights that he spent alone in the kollektiv, where he tried to kick Eskild out but really was happy that someone was spending time with him, and the genuine loneliness that had built up in the bottom of his stomach and had sat there for too long.

But what he had now that he didn’t have before was nine people at his beck and call, all of whom were always willing and keen and ready to hang out with him. And on top of that was the fact that Isak knew for certain that they wanted to be there and that every single one of them thought that spending time with him was fun.

All of that information though, and the only thing he has been able to fixate on is the absence of loneliness he feels now, and how strongly he used to feel it. Now that he’s concentrating on it, he sees the effects of his cluster everywhere; in everything from his general demeanour and his reaction whenever Eskild asks him to do the dishes all the way to his school life and his grades.

Even after the awkward ending to that interaction, all those months ago in the kitchen, the person that Isak hangs out with most is Even. Whenever Even isn’t doing anything, he’s almost always in Isak’s space, and vice versa.

And Even is the most fun person he’s ever had the opportunity to hang out with. He forces Isak to watch the most pretentious movies to help him ‘study’ for uni, and then complains incessantly when Isak retaliates with a Michael Bay movie. Even cooks him food when neither Eskild and Linn are home, he somehow manages to write little notes for Isak whenever Isak needs to remember something. There’s always a good morning text for him to wake up to, even on the days Even has early morning lectures, there’s always someone to keep him company when he’s bored, someone to entertain thoughts that Isak has never shared with anyone.

When he’s with Even, he gets a tiny glimpse of the sort of person that genuine and authentic Isak is, which is a person that current Isak is slowly becoming more and more familiar with.

Right now, he’s sitting with Magnus and Chris, the three of them sprawled on the floor with various papers in various different languages surrounding them. The three of them have been unsuccessfully trying to do homework for the past thirty minutes, but they’re really not the most effective study combination.

Every time one of them asks a question, someone else manages to come back with something funny or interesting and then they talk and they talk and they talk some more. It’s not the best way of studying, not productive like it is with Sana, but it’s the most fun that he has had in awhile.

The two of them have this way of making him laugh a lot more than he usually does, mostly in exasperation due to Magnus’ stupid comments every ten seconds. But somehow, Isak finds them funny now, with Chris’ witty retorts and the way she knows exactly how to shut him down. The two of them are comedy gold, and comedy gold during study time means no work ever gets done.

He’s holding his phone absentmindedly as he goes through something else with Chris, but it vibrates, pulling his attention away from the work spread out between them on the floor. He looks down on the screen, ten words beginning to carve themselves into his brain.

 

> **Emma: r u coming to my end of term thing? Xx**

Isak’s stomach drops through the floor as he reads the words illuminated in black letters on his phone screen over and over again. He’s been so caught up with everything else, learning about the people who occupy his head and how to structure his life around them, how to make everything work, that he has almost completely forgotten his real life and the people in it.

He had told Emma that he would go to her stupid party, but that was pre-cluster, when he felt so alone that he would do almost anything to try and make that go away. What was the point in even going anymore, when he had less than a semester left of school to just finish out before he could disappear off the face of the planet and carve out a new life somewhere else where he was actually wanted.

He types out the average _sorry, wish I could make it, something’s come up at home_ text that he usually sends to get out of these sorts of things, but before his fingers could hit the send button, a text from Elias appears at the top.

 

> **Elias: hope ill see u at Emma’s thing fag**

It’s the simple three letters at the end of that text that make the anxiety in his body increase by tenfold. Isak can just picture all of Elias’ friends standing around the phone and laughing, the image becoming increasingly scary the more he fixates on it.

The dream of disappearing off the face of the planet suddenly seems miles away, and the desperation that he feels to make Elias stop talking about him and his sexuality rises back up.

First he replies to Emma, his fingers shaking as he deletes his previous message and types out his confirmation that he will be there.

 

> _of course_
> 
> _wouldn’t miss it xx_

Her reply comes in almost immediately afterwards, three kisses in a row. His stomach turns. He doesn’t reply to Elias, can’t bring himself to. He doesn’t want to go to this, but the idea of being anything less than what the world expects of him to be is a big enough motivator for him to suck it up and go anyway.

He chucks his phone halfway across his room and turns his movie back on, trying to ignore the feeling of _wrongwrongwrong_ which is humming underneath his skin.

Magnus and Chris both look up at him, startled at his sudden movements. “Is everything okay?”

Isak nods quickly at Magnus, who shoots him a look as to say _I don’t believe you, what’s up?_ Isak shakes his head, muttering that “it’s fine Magnus, don’t worry about it.”

While he is paying attention to Magnus though, Chris has crawled over to retrieve his phone. His heart flares up in panic, but dies down when he realises that she hasn’t looked at whatever was on it, and just went over to retrieve it. She hands it back to him, the screen facing the floor. “Whatever it is, you know you can talk to us about it, right?”

Isak takes a deep breath to calm his shaking hands and nods at them. “I know. This is nothing, alright?”

The both of them radiate the fact that they are unconvinced, but Isak has never been more grateful for the fact that these are the people in his head and not anyone else, because they drop the subject, Magnus passing one of his sheets over to Isak for help.

“Why is this K? I thought prokaryotic cells did have a membrane?”

“They don’t have a _nuclear_ membrane, Mags,” Isak replies, stressing the nuclear. “They have a nuclear region, not a nucleus, so there can’t be anything to surround it.”

“Oh, right okay then.”

The three of them turn back to their work again, and as much as Isak tries to concentrate on it, the words from Elias have managed to burn themselves into his skull, playing on a repeating loop in the forefront of his mind.

The texts were too in sync for it to mean anything else than Emma and Elias were hanging out, as they were prone to doing as their little siblings were extremely close, or so Isak had heard. He knew that his affirmation text that he was coming to her party was read by both her and Elias, and if he wanted them off his back for a while he would have to at least turn up to the party.

It is the memory of Emma’s lips on his though, all wet slide and no spark, that made his stomach twist in dread, the fact that he would have to go through that again in order to convince Elias that in fact he was into Emma.

 

-

 

Isak doesn’t usually pre-game for parties. Elias always invites him to his, but why prolong his suffering. He’s much more of a stoner type anyway.

But tonight is different. For the last half an hour, he has been sitting alone in his room and drinking beer, trying to pregame by himself and get himself drunk enough that maybe tonight he will let Emma go down on him. He’s pulled out all the stops, made himself look as close to fashionable and desirable as he can, and is now trying his best to quell the dread in his stomach with copious amounts of alcohol.

He knew that someone was going to come and check on him eventually. It was only a matter of when.

“What’s up dog?”

It’s Eva, standing above him next to his bed and looking down on him, her eyes furrowed. She’s sweaty, sipping out of a drink bottle with a drawstring bag on her back. Isak’s muscles ache just looking at her.

He straightens his back, sits up a bit more so it looks like he’s more sober than he is. “Hey Eva.”

She tosses the drink bottle over her shoulder and flops down onto his bed, army crawling up the bed so that she is lying next to him. “Where are you going?”

“Party,” he replies, taking another sip of the beer in his hand. “Where have you been?”

“Netball.” Suddenly, Eva seems to notice the three empty beer bottles scattered around the bed. “Why the fuck are you drinking so much?”

“I’m drinking a normal amount?”

“Yeah, maybe if you were pre-gaming with friends. It’s a bit of a loserish thing to be drinking alone.” Isak feels a little chastised at that.

“I’m not a loser,” he says, realising how childish that sounds the moment the words leave his lips. Eva rolls her eyes.

“Whatever you say, loser,” she teases, sticking her tongue out at him.

Eva pulls out her phone and starts scrolling absentmindedly through her Instagram feed. It feels a bit weird to keep on drinking with her sitting there, but he keeps going, desperate to get drunk enough.

“Why are you going to this party anyway?”

Isak shrugs. “There’s a girl there I want to impress there.”

“So you have to get drunk to do it?” Eva replies, raising her eyebrows impetuously.

“I’m not very brave,” he mutters, taking another swig of the beer. His words cut deep, even if they mean something different than what Eva should take them as.

Suddenly, Eva’s body tenses up, and she looks up at him with a strange look in her eyes. “Do you even like her?”

Isak can feel his heart physically stop beating. The words sober him up faster than anything else ever could, his palms instantly going clammy. Terror pounds through his veins, the idea of Eva bringing up the one thing he’s so scared of admitting to anyone at all. “What? Yes I do?”

“No, I can feel it. You… you don’t like her?” Eva looks like she’s becoming more sure of her statement by the second, and Isak can feel the way her resolve is strengthening inside of her.

“I wouldn’t be going to her party if I didn’t like her!” Isak forces out, but Eva remains unconvinced.

Eva shoots him a look, furrowing her eyebrows.

“Yes you would. You’re so desperate for everyone to think you like her but you don’t. You don’t like her because…” Isak can see the wheels turning in Eva’s head, and he knows that she’s very quickly coming to the same conclusion Isak has been trying so hard to repress since he realised it himself. “Because you’re gay, aren’t you?”

His face pales, his hands start to sweat and his throat closes up. He wants to say something, to deny what she’s saying, but the words don’t come out of his throat. Eva takes his lack of response as confirmation that what she is saying is true, because she crawls off of the bed and begins to pace around his room, throwing her hands up in the air in frustration.

“I’m-” he tries to stutter out, but the words get caught on his tongue. She rolls her eyes at him again, and Isak doesn’t even have the energy to respond to that back, which is perhaps what Eva wants, because she’s off on a tangent now, and Isak has no idea how to stop her.

“Why wouldn’t you have told us that? We’re your fucking cluster Isak. We’re gonna accept you for who you are no matter what.”

Her voice becomes white noise in his ears, his panic beginning to get the best of him. Eva’s hand gestures are expressive enough that when they’re paired with the frustrated and confused look on her face make her look terrifying, at least to Isak.

His mouth is still hanging open, but he can’t seem to say anything. The whole world is over

“So come back to me when you’ve got your head out of your ass about that.”

She disappears then, back off to wherever the hell in the world she is right now. There’s some of her residual anger thrumming through him, banging around in the back of his head. Instead of responding to it though, he remembers what Mahdi taught him about visualising the door and shutting it on other people’s emotions.

It works, and he feels the anger in his body start to melt away. He doesn’t feel sad, or mortified or really anything at all. There’s just a big emptiness inside him, with more questions there than he had ever really considered.

The person he wants most in the world right now is Eskild, but he’s away for the week in Denmark, off at some drama festival for his uni course. He’s off having fun, and even though the logical part of his brain knows that Eskild wouldn’t mind helping him through this, guiding him through the hardest part of coming to terms with who he is and then admitting it to other people, Isak doesn’t want to bother him.

It takes him a while to realise that he needs someone who is different to him as well, someone who isn’t Eskild or someone else who… is like the two of them, but who can reassure him that that is okay and that Isak is okay.

He doesn’t get that for a while. He makes himself a cup of tea, clutching the warm mug in both of his hands and trying to leech the heat out of the cup and into himself. He is curled in the corner of his room, trying to take up as little space as he can.

Everything about his head is a mess right now. There is an uncomfortable feeling clinging to his skin as Eva’s words replay over and over in his head. There’s something about the way she said it, the way he doesn’t feel like he’s ready for her to know.

His brain gets stuck on that for a while, the idea of not being ready to come out. Is he ready or not? He knows that he doesn’t like girls, not like every other guy in the world does anyway. He knows that he is… gay, but the whole prospect of actually saying the words out loud and the fear that comes with that is leaving him unsure of whether he is ready or not.

And maybe that is just it. Maybe he’s okay with just him knowing for now. Other people should have come later.

 

-

 

Jonas has been the person in the cluster he’s been closest with, so it’s no surprise to Isak that he is the first person to purposefully seek Isak out, two days after him and Eva fought. Jonas being Jonas manages to start this talk without Isak realising it’s a talk at all, instead starting it off like all their other hangouts start; with a game of FIFA and a beer.

Jonas’ subtlety can’t last forever though, and Isak is finally clued onto the fact that Jonas is here to talk about Eva when he says, staring intently at the TV screen in front of him, “So… that talk with Eva?”

Isak’s whole body tenses up. “What about it?”

Jonas takes a breath in, his eyes darting quickly to steal a glance at Isak before immediately retreating back to the safety of the screen. “You know you can talk to me about it, right? Because I’m not straight either, so like… I know.”

Now that takes Isak by surprise. He turns around to face Jonas, completely forgetting about the FIFA game. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Jonas nods. “Don’t really have a label yet, but I know that I’m definitely not straight.”

“Oh.”

Isak pauses the FIFA game and leans back into the couch, trying to bury himself deeper into it.

“I’ve never liked girls?” He says softly,  testing out the words on his tongue and swirling them around for a while. “I’ve never liked girls.”

Jonas bumps his shoulder into Isak’s own softly. “That’s okay, you know.”

Isak doesn’t know what to say in response to that, but as he sits and tries to think of one, another startling thought occurs to him. “Wait, did you already know? Before Eva, I mean?”

Jonas has the decency to look sheepish, staring down at the floor and reaching up to rub his neck. “You were pretty obvious with your crush bro. We kind of all figured it out. Plus, when you share emotions the way you do, it’s pretty hard not to notice.”

“Fuck,” he says, leaning forward and burying his head in his hands to try and cover his embarrassment. Suddenly, Jonas’ words fully hit him, his face turning ashy white. “Wait, crush? You know about that too?”

Jonas just rolls his eyes. “Bro, if anyone ever told you that you were subtle about anything, they were lying.”

“Fuck,” Isak says, shutting his eyes and thinking about the implication of what Jonas is saying. If the whole cluster managed to pick up his supposedly incredibly obvious crush, then Even most likely did as well. Jonas clues on to his train of thought almost instantly.

“Even likes you too, if you’re wondering. He’s been about as subtle as a bull in a china shop. It’s been causing all of the rest of us a lot of pain. Also confusion.”

“Confusion?”

“Well, the confusion’s all me. I can’t tell if I actually want to hook up with Eva or whether it’s residual feelings from you two knuckleheads and all of your stupid pining.”

“You’ll never know if you don’t try?”

“I could give the same advice to you, you wanker.”

A silence settles over them again, and instead of thinking about what to say to keep the conversation going, Isak just unpauses the FIFA game, taking them back to the ‘safe zone’ in their relationship.

But because Isak’s brain isn’t focusing on holding a conversation with Jonas anymore, it’s now focusing on analysing every minute detail of every moment he’s spent with his cluster mates over the last six months.

It’s taken him three days of staring at the ceiling and psychoanalysing every word that Eva said to him for him to realise where Eva was coming from when she got so angry at him. She probably had no idea the depth as to which Isak was struggling with this, how he’s still struggling with this. It’s not the first thing that someone like her would consider, not when every portrayal of a man like him in modern media is flamboyant and happy and cheerful and totally okay with who they are.

None of them are like Isak.

He’s not really mad at her anymore. He wants to feel grateful, but he’s done researching online and he doesn’t know if he’s allowed to feel grateful for what so many people describe as such a traumatic experience. Part of him is wondering as well if he would have ever reached this point in his life without the cluster, because it’s almost all down to them about how much they’re changing him as a person.

All while Isak is having these thoughts, Jonas keeps glancing over at him. For as much of a closed off person as Isak is in real life, he cannot manage to keep himself from projecting. It can be quite hard having to watch his thoughts. It’s not something he’s ever had to do before.

And then he is taken by the sudden urge to apologise for projecting, even if he’s not entirely sure that he’s doing it.

“I’m sorry about all this,” Isak says, gesturing to his head wildly. Jonas pauses the game again and turns around, a sharp look on his face.

“Don’t you ever be sorry about that again, okay? Coming out should have been your own thing, and Eva was wrong to rush that and pressure you into being ready before your time.

“Nah, Eva’s okay,” Isak says, watching his hands intently as he fiddles with them. “I don’t think I would have ever come out unless someone made me.”

He pauses for a while.

Isak could not be more grateful for Jonas in this moment, because he is exactly the person that he needs right now. The quiet reassurance that he emits, the way he is so eternally patient in waiting for Isak to come to him and not forcing anything that Isak doesn’t want to have happen, this man is the brother that Isak has been subconsciously looking for his entire life.

“I’m gay,” he says, the words leaving his tongue and entering the open air. Something in him lifts, a weight dissolving away which Isak didn’t even know was there. Jonas reaches for his hand, and their fingers tangle together, but with none of the sparks that he gets when Even does it. He leans down to rest his head on Jonas’ shoulder, blinking back tears yet again.

“Fuck, this cluster has made me emotional. I was never like this before.”

“It’s alright Isak. You don’t have to hide the fact you’re secretly all mushy on the inside with us.” Jonas grins at him. “Dude, that Emma though. She’s gotta be so thick if she never noticed how firmly not into her you are.”

“Could she not tell how half hearted I was every time she tried to suck my face off?” Isak chuckles lightly, a wry grin on his face. His heart gets lighter with every word, because god knows he’s wanted to admit that for such a long time.  

And just like that, Isak feels like his place in the cluster has suddenly become more cemented and rigid. Everything’s okay.

 

-

 

Isak is saved the pain of talking to every member of the cluster about his discovered sexuality, because he gets Jonas to spread the word for him. Even comes to him quickly after that, making sure he’s okay and that everything is okay now, because apparently what Isak thought was Even’s attempt at keeping everything normal for him was actually Eva keeping him in the dark about the spat that they had had.

Even and him have a long conversation after that, about sexuality and the world and all of that. Isak can tell that Even is holding something back from him, that the story about the first boy Even ever had a crush on was a lie, but he doesn’t pry. Even deserves his time.

Eva’s still avoiding him too, but she deserves her time as well. Isak knows that she’s probably been chewed out by everyone about what she did, and she needs time to lick her wounds and salvage her pride.

There is one person in his life whom Jonas can’t tell though, and the idea of having that conversation is terrifying to Isak. Terrifying, but necessary.

“Hey Eskild, can we talk?”

Isak is hovering in the doorway of Eskild’s bedroom awkwardly, his hand running up and down his arm nervously. Eskild looks up from his position, where he is sprawled haphazardly over the sheets, stomach down. He narrows his eyes at Isak. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, it’s fine. I just want to talk.”

Eskild’s face breaks out into a grin. “I never thought the day would come where you want to talk to me about something.” He sits up, crossing his legs and patting the space beside him. “Come and sit, tell your guru and let me guide you.”

Isak rolls his eyes, but complies with Eskild’s request, moving over next to him and sitting down. Eskild wriggles over so that they are almost touching, bumping their sides together. “So. What is it?”

“I don’t like girls, Eskild.”

The statement is simple and to the point, but it’s Eskild’s reaction, or lack thereof, that gives away the fact that like every other person in Isak’s life, he already knew. After a second however, the reaction he was expecting comes.

Eskild doesn’t hug him, or suddenly coo and act all over the top. He just smiles fondly, placing both hands on Isak’s shoulders and staring him in the eye. “I am so proud of you Isak.”

Isak is the one to initiate the hug, burying his face in Eskild’s shoulder and clinging on to him tightly. Eskild is his family in a way that’s different to the cluster, in a way that feels a lot like home.

“You’ve always known, haven’t you? That I’m… not straight.”

Eskild’s face softens even more. “Isak, you had your own demons to face first before you could admit it to yourself, and it wasn’t my place to interfere with that.”

“Someone did though,” Isak says offhandedly. Eskild immediately tenses, his face lighting up with anger.

“What?” he breathes, barely concealed fury in his voice.

Isak rushes to soothe Eskild. “It’s okay Eskild. She kind of knows me better than I know myself. I’m okay now.”

Eskild bristles. “It’s still not okay for someone to out you before you’re ready, even if it is to yourself.”

Suddenly, Isak’s brain begins to put pieces together, about the reason why Eskild might be so angry about this. “Did someone… you know… out you?”

Eskild grimaces, but shakes his head. “No, no one outed me. I’ve kind of always been comfortable with who I am. But I grew up in one of the most homophobic environments you would ever have seen. Instead of trying to blend in like you did, I went the opposite way. I shaved my head, was always in bright colours and mismatching fashions, being obnoxious about the boys that I liked and all that. In second year, when I was old enough for the government payment thing, my father had had enough, kicked me out. Best thing that ever happened to me. Moved in with a nice lesbian couple and a trans dude who went to UiO, and who let me keep the apartment when they all left, and such the kollektiv was born.”

He gestures around the apartment sadly, half heartedly muttering a “Ta da!”

“You didn’t have to share that if it made you sad Eskild.”

“It’s alright. I’ve worked my ass off to get where I am today, and I’m proud of that. And I’m proud of you too Isak. It takes a shit load of courage to be authentically yourself, alright?”

Isak nods, a fond little smile gracing his face. “Thanks Eskild. For everything.”

He almost makes it out of Eskild’s room without being interrogated, but apparently that was too much to ask from this conversation, because Eskild stops him in the doorway and makes him turn around.

“Hold on, is there a boy in your life?” Eskild asks, waggling his eyebrows and elbowing him in the side. Isak knows that he means it as a joke, but he can’t stop the butterflies in his chest from lighting up.

“Can I get back to you on that one?”

“What?” Eskild’s eyes widen with excitement, his grip on Isak’s arm tightening until his knuckles turn white.

“No, Eskild, it’s nothing as serious as what you’re thinking. I just… I just hope there will be.”

Somewhere through the bond, Isak can feel Even’s hum of contentment. He tries not to read too much into it.

“Now go forth into the world, my baby Jesus.” Eskild’s face suddenly lights up with absolute glee, as he stares intently at Isak with wide eyes. “Go forth, my baby gay.”

“For fucks sakes, Eskild,” Isak huffs, turning on his heels and making a hasty exit out of Eskild’s bedroom, back to the safety of his own.

 

-

 

Eva avoids him for three more days after Isak speaks to Eskild. That conversation with Eskild was almost like floodgates opening, because now he was ready to speak to his other family about this, to expressively tell them all that yes, yes he is gay and to ask what they thought he should say to Eva. Every single one of them has come back with how proud they are of him, about how they love him no matter what.

He’s had some of the deepest and most enlightening conversations with everyone, about religion and culture and upbringings and parents and everything with people who understand him just as well as he understands himself, and suddenly he feels so much more at home in his own skin because of it.

Because he is gay. He is. And he can say that now to himself in the mirror without a pit of anxiety flooding his chest. There’s still anxiety, but every time he says those two words, another knot on the line loosens and comes undone. Because standing right behind him are the people he loves the most. Now he’s just waiting for Eva to join those people.

It’s late at night for him when she finally comes. She’s in gym clothes, her hair slicked back in a wet ponytail from a shower. He can feel the pain in her arms, residual from some sort of workout. Her whole body is tense, her fight or flight instinct preparing her to get out of there at any moment.

“I’ve come to apologise,” she states blankly, almost like she is bracing herself. Isak can tell she is expecting his anger, or frustration. She is expecting him to be mad, to explode. But he doesn’t do any of that. He pats the bed next to him, gesturing with his head for her to come over. Eva hops up on the bed and crawls up beside him gingerly, leaving a healthy space between them. Isak rolls his eyes.

“I’m not mad, alright?”

“But I-”

“You outed me to myself, and yes I probably wasn’t ready for other people to know, but what’s done is done.”

“It was still a really shitty thing of me to do.”

“It was a shitty thing, and I’m not going to tell you otherwise,” Isak says, not unkindly. Eva bows her head  “But you didn’t mean it maliciously. We are so intertwined up in our heads that sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s thinking what. And there’s no way I could have kept it a secret from any of you guys, not when you’re in my head so much.”

Eva takes that as her queue to shuffle a little closer to Isak. Isak doesn’t hesitate in wrapping an arm around her and bringing her in so that they’re half hugging half curled together.

“I’m okay Eva,” he whispers into her hair. “It’s okay. You’re forgiven.”

 

-

 

It’s a story that Eskild likes to tell often, the one about how exactly he obtained the House Bell. He was completely wasted at a bar one night, and with a pretty boy hanging off his arm he decided the best way to impress him was to get him a pearl. In the strangest turn of events, Eskild managed to locate a guy who was selling ‘clams’, followed him to his house with the pretty boy from the bar, had a threesome, brought the ‘clams’ and returned home.

Two days later, a giant bell arrived on the doorstep of the kollektiv with a note and no return address. “Sorry dude, I sell bells. No refunds.”

Isak has heard that story so many times he could recite it in his sleep. The origin story of the House Bell. The House Bell isn’t this small little dainty thing either. It’s massive, and only ever used as a summons to a house meeting, which are called almost solely by Eskild.

“What the fuck is that,” Even says, lifting his head up from the pillow. They had ended up like this a lot more recently, the casual intimacy of their proximity to each other making Isak’s heart pound through his chest. Even has given him no clue as to whether he knows how affected Isak is or whether he is as affected as him, which has irritated Isak to no end.

Isak groans. The House Bell is ringing, the deafening sound echoing throughout the kollektiv.

“The House Bell.” At Even’s confused look, he elaborates. “It’s the call to a house meeting. Means Eskild has some issue and wants us to fix it.”

“Are you going to go?”

“I’ve been summoned, haven’t I?” Isak says with a wry laugh. In Even’s back pocket his phone begins to vibrate, playing the obnoxious ringtone extremely loudly. Isak winces.

“Shit,” Even says, looking down at the phone. “I’ve been summoned too. I have that lecture today, with Paul Verhoeven…”

“The Dutch director who did Robocop, yeah I know. You haven’t been able to shut up about it.”

“Actually, he’s more famous for Basic Instinct, which is a much better-” Even blushes, ducking his head, realising that he’s rambling. “Am I really that bad?”

“Yeah,” Isak teases back, a twinkle in his eye. “Go on then. Promise I won’t disturb you, even if it’s an emergency.”

“If you need me though…” Even says, the seriousness seeping through, which makes Isak’s stomach light up with fireworks again.

“I’m not gonna need you, okay? Go and have fun.” Before he knows it, Even is gone, disappearing back to his reality where he gets to live and have an amazing experience which Isak can’t wait to hear all about. Not just because he loves seeing the way Even gets so interested in things, the way his face lights up with pure ecstasy as he explains something that he loves to Isak. Because he’s actually interested in you know… film… things.

Isak rolls over onto his back and lets out a deep sigh. The thing he didn’t mention to Even was that these house meetings were only ever called when Isak was doing something wrong or there was something else he needed to do. Technically, one could be called for Linn too, but Linn has never once had to have her behaviour changed, because she has the skill of managing to adjust without having to be told to do it, a skill which Isak lacks. He envies her for it.

The other issue with the House Bell is the location in which it is kept. The simple fact is, the kollektiv is not a democracy but a dictatorship, because the dictator Eskild keeps the Bell safely in his room, so that no one can call a meeting on him.

He pushes himself up out of bed with the last dredges of his energy and trudges down the corridor to the living room. When he gets there, it’s just Eskild sitting on one of the sofas, gesturing to the other one for Isak to sit. The whole set up feels oddly formal, making him feel oddly afraid of what’s to come. A part of him is telling him he called it though, that this meeting was about him and something he needed to do-slash-change.

“Uh, so, what’s up Eskild?” Isak says, the hesitation clear in his voice.

Eskild readjusts himself on the sofa, a little awkwardly. His back is a little stiff, a clear sign that he is trying to act professional and mature, more so than he would ever normally do. “So, Isak. Me and Linn have been talking, and we have decided, with the recent revelation of your cooking skills, starting this week, you are responsible for one _home-cooked_ meal each week. Negotiations for take-away on special occasions.”

“I’m sorry what?”

“Just one night a week where you are responsible for dinner. That’s all. It’s not that hard, and it’s teaching you some valuable life skills.” Eskild looks overly cheerful for this news, a cheerfulness which does not reach his eyes.

“But Eskild! I have no idea how to cook?” He pleads, his voice twinged with a sense of frantic scrambling for an excuse for a way out of this. Eskild isn’t having a bar of it.  

“Um, bullshit Baby Jesus! Those eggs from the other morning were delicious.” At the sight of Isak’s frankly terrified face, he adds,  “It’s alright, I’m sure we can tolerate a few failed dishes while you learn.”

Isak sputters, trying to work out what to say in retaliation. Eskild takes this as Isak’s acceptance of this new found rule.

“Great! I’m glad that’s settled now.” Eskild springs up from the couch. “We don’t really have any food in the house, so Linn and I are going shopping in a couple of hours. You’re welcome to join us if you’d like. You might need some extra ingredients for your first dive into the forays of proper cooking.”

“Uh… okay,” Isak stutters out.

Eskild is halfway out of the kitchen, before he pauses, turning around slowly, almost like he’s bracing himself. His face is tense. “One more thing.”

Isak narrows his eyes. “What?”

“Do you think you can cook tonight?”

Eskild doesn’t even finish the question before he’s assuming Isak’s response, yelling thank you all down the hallway as he retreats back into his bedroom.

Isak doesn’t hesitate before pushing himself off of the couch and almost bolting for the safety of his room as well.

When he shuts the door behind him and feels the sense of safety wash over him, he flops down head first onto his bed and buries his head into his pillow. His mind flashes back to the other week at breakfast, when Even offered to help him cook. Fuck. Even’s in that lecture right now, with the famous director. And even though he had insisted that if Isak needed anything he would come running, but this was super important to him and Isak didn’t want to interrupt that. Even had even gone so far as to send them all a text to remind them not to talk to him instead of just spontaneously visiting and running the risk of one of them forgetting. That was how important this was to Even. If only he took him up on his offer to teach Isak how to cook, then maybe he could whip up a simple pasta dish or something.

He can feel part of his cluster visiting him, but he’s too absorbed in his own worry to tell who it is. “I can feel your worry from here. What’s up?”

It’s Noora. He raises his head slightly from the pillow to look at her where she’s sitting. She’s surrounded by Chris on one side and Vilde on the other, both of them with their heads bowed and their eyes furrowed. There’s a card game of some sorts going on on the floor, and if the heavily scribbled on score sheet by Noora’s feet is anything to go by, it’s been going on for a while.

“Eskild’s making me cook. Tonight,” he says dramatically, flopping back onto the bed and burying his head into the pillow.

Although he can’t see it, he can feel the pressure of the raised eyebrows that she sends him. “And that’s a problem?”

“Noora,” Isak whines. “I can barely make myself cereal.”

Chris looks up from her cards. “Surely that’s not true. Cooking isn’t that hard?”

“Maybe not for you but definitely for me. And now I have to cook once a week. Fuck.” Isak collapses back on his bed, trying to block out the world. The girls don’t look up from their game.

“Well, if you’d like I can help you make a paella or something,” Noora offers. “I’m not a bad cook.”

“Yeah, and I can make a mean sushi!” Chris chimes in.

“Thanks you two,” Isak turns his head so he’s lying on his stomach and facing the girls side on, a hint of a smile on his face. “I really appreciate it.”

“And if we teach you, that means one day you can do it all by yourself!” Chris grins, brandishing a card and placing it on one of the piles. Isak’s grin falters a little bit at the idea of having to invest time and energy into cooking.

He remembers watching his mum in the kitchen, starting dinner preparation literally three or four hours before dinner actually was. He does not want that to become his life, even if it’s just for one day a week.

“Surely I can just like borrow your skills while you’re not there? Like I don’t actually have to learn how to do it myself if you guys already know?” He offers, flipping over so that he’s lying on his back and staring up at the ceiling.

“I don’t know man,” Chris shrugs. “We’ve never tried that before.”

“No better time than the present,” Isak offers, but its half hearted, because stealing someone else’s skills still means that he has to do it himself, and right now that sounds like the least desirable option.

There’s silence for a while, as the girls continue their card game on his floor, before Vilde looks up slightly and turns to him, still avoiding his gaze.

“I can teach you how to make zharkoye if you’d like…,” She begins, her voice small. “It’s my babushka’s recipe. Mama used to make it for me when I was little. I don’t get it very much anymore.”

Isak sits up and faces her, tuning into the soft, wistful tone of her voice. “We could make it tonight if you want? You and me?”

“Yeah, I’d like that,” Vilde replies, a sweet sort of half smile spreading across her face. She puts another card down on one of the piles, gesturing to Chris to play her turn.

“Well, my roommates and I are going shopping in a bit, so I’ll just let you know when I’m ready to go yeah?” Isak looks down at the twelve stacks of cards in front of the girls. “What are you playing anyway?”

“This one’s called Sevens. Aim of the game is to get all of your cards out of your hand. We’ve been teaching each other card games that we played while we grew up.”

“Have you ever played Spoons?”

“Spoons?”

Isak grins at them, hopping off the bed and rummaging through one of his drawers looking for a couple of things that could double as spoons. “They don’t have to be spoons, but the aim of the game is to-”

 

-

 

There are two grocery stores around the block from kollektivet, which in Jonas’ eyes are equally as capitalist and shitty. They do the job though, and it’s where he finds himself at 16:30 on a Thursday evening with Eskild and Linn, watching as Vilde picks out ingredients and vegetables he doesn’t even know if he has eaten before. She moves around the store, humming to herself while she picks out leafy green things Isak doesn’t know the name of. As Isak leans back against one of the shelves and watches her move, he can see the way that her ballet career translates to the way she move in real life, the way that every step is dainty and the way that she is hyper aware of everything around her.

Eskild moves over to him to examine the what appears to be mismatched selection of items that have been selected, looking horrified at the selection currently in his basket.

“Isak what in god’s name _are_ you making with that?”

Vilde dances airily around him. “Zharkoye.”

It takes Eskild’s expression after Vilde says it for him to remember that Vilde is halfway across the world sitting in her apartment in Moscow and that Eskild can’t actually see her. However, Vilde’s words did come out of his mouth and he just pronounced it flawlessly, hence the confused looks on Eskild’s face.

“Uh, it’s Russian,” he backtracks “I found it on the internet.”

“Since when could you speak Russian?” Linn asks, sounding mildly disinterested.

“Fluke?” Isak shrugs his shoulders, pushing past Eskild to where Vilde was standing, her arms crossed as she waited impatiently for him to come and put yet another unknown rooty vegetable in his basket. At this point, the only two things in his basket that he recognised were carrots and potatoes.

“Okay, we need some dill and a couple of spices. Can you ask Eskild whether you have tumeric and cardamom?”

Isak relays the question. Eskild looks confused.

“I’m sorry baby Jesus, I had no idea that you even knew what spices were? Is this your way of subtly hinting to me that you actually know how to cook after all.”

“Oh fuck off Eskild. Do we have them or not?”

Eskild shrugs. “No idea.”

“Well, looks like we have to get some then! Come on!” Vilde says cheerily, flouncing down to the spice aisle. Isak follows her, leaving Eskild and Linn behind to continue browsing his least favourite section of the grocery store.

“Is there anything else you need or is it just ingredients for tonight’s dinner?” Vilde asks, her attention almost completely on the spice rack in front of her.

Isak is shaking his head before she even finishes the sentence. Vilde turns around to look at him.

“What?”

“Uh, no it’s fine. I don’t need anything.”

“Isak. What is it?”

“I just, um, wanted some snacks is all.”

Vilde shutters. “You know how bad those are for you?”

Suddenly, Isak can feel his throat closing over, the hunger in his stomach disappearing and being replaced with a sort of empty pang, like hunger but almost as if its the memory of the feeling.

Isak feels trapped there, stuck between the snacks which seems to be glaring at him and Vilde who is cowering next to him, just looking between them. He can feel her collapsing inside, and internally, he’s panicking too. He’s only beginning to put the puzzle pieces together, and even though he has a good idea that doesn’t mean he knows what the fuck to do about it. He pushes at all of them in the back of his mind, desperate for help.

Suddenly, Noora is standing between them, using her body to block out the snacks from Vilde’s purview and using her hands to make sure Vilde keeps her focus on her. It’s subtle, something Isak would never have noticed had he not been inside Noora’s head and understanding ee.

“Hey Vilde, can you come help me with this Russian thing? I saw this poem on the internet somewhere but the original is in Russian and the translation feels a little wrong.”

“But-” Vilde says, turning around to look back at Isak. Noora brings her back kindly.

“I’m sure Isak can finish up the shopping, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure thing,” Isak says back, keeping his voice as calm as he can. He doesn’t even finish his sentence before the two of them are gone, leaving him in the supermarket alone, with no idea where to start in his search for ingredients for zharkoye.

Jonas appears next to him instead. “Just google it. I’m sure there’s a recipe somewhere.”

“But what if its the wrong ingredients? She said it was her grandmothers recipe?”

“Better the wrong ingredients than no ingredients at all,” Jonas coos back at him, picking up breadcrumbs from the shelf.

“Do you need these?”

Isak looks down at his phone. “No, no breadcrumbs. Leeks though.”

“What the fuck is a leek?” Jonas says, peering over his shoulder at the list on his phone.

Isak shoots him a look back. “Does it look like I have a fucking clue?”

“Does it look like you have a fucking clue what?” Eskild cuts in, peering over the other shoulder and down at the phone.

“There are leeks in the recipe.”

“And you don’t know what a leek is. Come on baby Jesus, have you ever eaten a vegetable in your life!” Eskild says, grabbing something which Isak wouldn’t be able to identify on a good day out.

Jonas leans against the vegetables, smirking. “That’s not a leek either,” he says, pointing at the label. “That’s an onion.”

Isak looks between Eskild holding the onion triumphantly up with one hand and Jonas smirking in amusement and just laughs.

 

-

 

It’s not a long walk home by any means, as the supermarket is around the corner, but Isak’s arms still hurt when he gets to the front steps of the kollektiv. He collapses the moment that he can, the groceries falling heavily on the steps.

He can see Eskild turn to Linn and ask something but Isak tunes out, shutting his eyes and leaning back against the steps. He tunes back in again when Eskild starts yelling, squinting at the two of them.

You said you had your key Linn!”

Linn just shrugs at Eskild, sitting down on the steps out the front of the kollektiv and putting the groceries she was carrying down next to her, rummaging around for her phone. Eskild looks expectantly at her.

“What?”

“Are you going to look for your keys or not?”

Linn rummages around in her bag for a second, looking for her keys halfheartedly, before glancing back up and Eskild and shrugging again.

“I don’t have them.”

“What about Astrid?”

“Astrid’s not back for another hour,” she says simply. “I guess we’ll have to wait.”

Astrid is their downstairs neighbour, a grad student who was doing the same degree as Linn, which was gender and women’s studies. She has two cats, was in more often than she was out and was Eskild’s preferred drinking partner for the nights he craved a glass of rosé and a gossip about the latest drama at uni. Isak was also 90% sure that Linn was at least sleeping with her, as he had seen Astrid in the kollektiv kitchen on many an early morning.

Jonas, who had walked home with him, grins beside him. “Hey,” he says, moving over to Eskild, “Have you got that keyring I got you?”

Eskild shoots him a confused look, but complies with his request and rummages around in his back pocket for the keyring, with his car keys and a couple of the keys for the storage cupboard and lacking the only key that they need right now. Jonas takes the keyring from him and moves over to the door, twisting the thin wire out of shape.

“Hey!” Eskild calls in protest. Jonas just turns around and grins at him. Isak suddenly has a visual of Jonas with his friends at age eleven, all of his friends age thirteen or fourteen, picking a lock and breaking into someone’s home to retrieve the soccer ball that had accidentally travelled over the fence. He also has a visual image of the beating he got going home to his mother, arm gripped tight by the angry mother who the house belonged to, and how he never saw those boys again.

The thin wire that used to be a keyring slides neatly into the electronic lock of the kollektiv door, clicking the panel open and sliding it off, revealing a mangled pile of multi-coloured wires underneath.

“Isak, what are you doing?” Eskild’s voice is increasingly frantic now, but Jonas doesn’t stop, picking up one of the frayed wires and placing it with another, the contact making sparks. Suddenly, the door clicks open, just enough that Eskild’s face lights up with glee. Even Linn looks mildly impressed, getting up and moving inside with her share of the groceries.

“Since when have you been able to pick a lock hm?” Eskild tuts at him, pushing past to get up the stairs, into the flat and into the kitchen to dump his groceries on the counter. “Have you been involved in some criminal activity before?”

As Isak pushes himself up, he can feel the way his body suddenly becomes his own again. Jonas is sitting up on the kitchen bench when Isak walks in, watching as Eskild flounces around the kitchen, putting his groceries away.

“Uh, Youtube?” He offers to Eskild as an explanation, even though he knows that it’s subpar at best.

Vilde is sitting next to Jonas, her head leaning on his shoulder. Isak can feel the tension in her body, all coiled up like a spring, but he doesn’t comment on it. Jonas radiates calm, even at the worst of times, and Isak can tell that Vilde needs it probably just as much as he does.

The kollektiv is filled with question after question as the three of them put away their groceries. It’s almost entirely Eskild asking and Vilde answering, even though Eskild doesn’t know that.

“I have some shit for uni to finish, so knock on my door when it’s done, alright?” Eskild says when he’s done. He turns around and waggles his eyebrows at Isak, a grin on his face. “I’m excited!”

“Do you think I should tell him?” Isak looks wistfully at the door that Eskild has just locked behind him.

“If you want,” Jonas says, coming up beside him. “He’d take it well, I think.”

“Doesn’t he practise magic or something?” Vilde asks, pulling out pots and pans that Isak didn’t even know that the kollektiv owned.

“He used to I think. He’s a big believer in that stuff,” Isak says, turning back to face them. “Is that even a good thing though? What if he uses as proof for all the magic things he believes in?”

“I think,” Jonas starts, effectively ending his train of thought, “that Eskild loves you enough that he would accept anything that you told him. He wouldn’t try to use it as proof that gods and goddesses exist or anything like that. The only thing it would do is prove to him that the world is bigger and more complicated than he could ever hope to understand.”

“He already knows that,” Isak chuckles half-heartedly.

“Exactly,” Vilde says, hovering between them. “Now come on Isak, I’m supposed to be teaching you how to cook, not doing it for you.”

Jonas is no help at cooking, Isak discovers. He can’t do anything more than make toast and two minute noodles, which is about the same as what Isak can do. The three of them putter around the kitchen, Jonas and Isak getting in the way more than they help. But it’s Vilde, who expertly chops up strips of beef and cabbage and leek, which Jonas and him discovered was yet another leafy green vegetable, just seems to bleed experience with this sort of thing.

She babbles all the way through, telling the two of them exactly what she is doing and what it will do in the final meal. She’s prone to the babble, but it’s nice, even if it’s attempting to fill a nonexistent gap in between them all.

And between the three of them, they make something edible that actually smells amazing, which if Isak was being completely honest with himself he was not expecting. It looks hearty and warm and good, and even if he did less than ten percent of the work in making this he’s still proud of it. Plus, Eskild will come in later and think that he did all of the work, which is a gigantic ego boost to his nonexistent cooking skills.

“Do you think I’ll be able to eat it too?” Vilde asks, looking down and staring intently at the zharkoye in the pot. As he looks more at her, he realises she isn’t really looking at the zharkoye but at a memory, of her sitting on the counter like Jonas and him had done while her grandmother had moved around and cooked for her, offering up a taste of every step, every time a new ingredient was added. Isak can taste the memory on his own tongue.

He smiles wistfully at her. “Well, there’s only one way to find out.” He gestures down to the stew. “Have a plate.”

Jonas moves over to dish one up for her, just a little. He shoots Isak a glance, fading as quickly as it comes. Vilde grabs a fork from the drawer and moves over to where they are standing, She picks at the food, sorting it out on her plate; beef in one corner, greens in another, tomatoes in a third.

Eventually though, she takes a bite, letting it rest on her tongue a while, her eyes shutting gingerly. Isak knows that it probably the same as the weed was, the taste being like the memory of it, but Vilde still seems to enjoy it nonetheless.

“It tastes the same,” she says, smiling at them. “Thank you Isak.”

“Thank you for helping me.”

Jonas elbows him in the side. “What Isak means to say is _thank you Vilde for doing all my cooking for me and saving me from getting roasted by Eskild.”_

Vilde smiles softly, her eyes twinkling in genuine happiness.

It’s at that moment that Eskild pokes his head out of his door, Isak looking up to see a grin on his face. “That smells amazing,” he says dramatically. “I am _so_ mad at you right now.”

That was not the reaction that Isak was expecting. “What?”

Eskild has already made his way over to the kitchen, and is now shovelling zharkoye into his mouth like it’s the last meal he’ll ever eat. “You’ve. Kept. This. From. Me.”

Vilde is giggling at Eskild. Isak just rolls his eyes, knowing that he has now secured his place in cooking every week even though he has no idea how to.

 

-

 

For Isak, Saturday mornings were one of his favourite times. There was no rush to get up, to be awake and somewhere, alert and ready to go at a godforsaken hour of the morning. Saturday mornings were always languid and viscous and smooth, a time where he could just relax and do things at his own pace. Usually, he dozes in and out for the better part of an hour, only waking up when the sun is well and truly streaming from his window and onto his bed.

This morning is different. There is something in the back of his mind and in the hollow of his chest, heavy and weighted. It’s not his own anxiety, he knows what that feels like by now. And the way it’s kind of settling down and dispersing out tells him that the worst of it is over now.

The fact that his traditional Saturday morning routine has been disrupted leaves him groggy, the remnants of sleep still clinging to him. He forces himself out of bed and down into the living room, on his way to make himself a cup of tea.

The image doesn’t register at first. Noora is such an integral part of his life that seeing her on the couch really doesn’t ring any bells for him. He acknowledges her presence, mutters a hello to Eskild and moves into the kitchen to sate his growling stomach.

It’s only when Eskild moves to follow him that he realises somethings up.

“Isak,” Eskild hisses, grabbing his arm. “There is a very pretty Spanish girl who says she knows you crying on our couch.”

“She’s not Spanish, she’s British,” Isak says, rubbing at his eyes. He stops abruptly, all of what Eskild just said hits him in a rush. “Wait, what?”

“There’s a very pretty-”

“Yeah yeah,” Isak says dismissively, rushing back into the living room, “you can see her?”

“What do you mean can I see her, of course I can see her? She’s sitting right there.”

Noora _is_ sitting right there. Clutching a steaming cup of tea, with puffy eyes, tear tracks and the hints of a bruise on her cheek, she is curled up in the corner of the couch and staring off into the distance. She smiles weakly when she sees him.

“Hey Isak.”

He knows intuitively what happened. His cheek tingles with the feeling of the way William’s hand collided with it, the way the pain had spread all over and the way that that was nothing compared to the pain in her heart. How Chris brought her the cheapest plane ticket she could find from Madrid to somewhere, anywhere where her clustermates were, and how that somewhere just happened to be Oslo.

Isak moves over and crouches down in front of her, resting his hands gently on the side of the couch. “You’re okay, Noora.”

She gently places the tea down on the side bench, visibly trying to compose herself. The tears well up in her eyes anyway, and with a sigh of _oh, Isak_ she flings her arms around him and just lets herself sob.

They are all here then, crowded around Isak and Noora and trying to force on them as much love as eight other people can. Isak just holds on tighter.

 

-

 

The shower in the kollektiv is quite possibly the worst shower Isak has ever used. The showerhead is old and kind of rusted and the tub at the bottom is cracking under the pressure of the hard globs of water that the showerhead can’t disperse evenly. Whenever the shower is on, the whole kollektiv knows about it.

Isak is just sitting at the kitchen table, listening to the sound of the shower rattle through their tiny flat. Eskild is opposite him, scrolling through his newsfeed and eating a steaming plate of eggs, which Isak had gotten Even to make. It was the least that Isak could do for Eskild, considering he was about to trust him with one of the biggest secrets he had ever had. He takes small sips from his tea, waiting for Eskild to start asking the questions he knows are on his mind.

“So,” Eskild begins, his mouth half full of eggs and toast. “How do you know this girl?”

Isak doesn’t look up from his phone. “Noora, and uh, an exchange program through school?”

“Bullshit. There is no way an exchange student would turn up on our doorstep crying like that. How do you know Noora?”

“The internet?”

Eskild smiles wearily at him. “You’re a shit liar Isak. What’s really going on? Is it about your mother? About you?”

Isak can see the train of thought Eskild is following, and it isn’t all wrong.

“You’ve got to make something up,” Sana says in his ear. “He won’t believe you. This is too implausible.”

Magnus is on his other side. “Don’t listen to Sana. Eskild is your family Isak. Plus, he believes in all that magic stuff. Why is this any different?”

“God, it’s like having the angel and the devil on your shoulders,” Isak mutters. Eskild’s head shoots up.

“Who are you talking to?” He hisses, his eyes wide.

“Uh?”

“Isak. I want you to be honest with me. Really honest. I did my research on schizophrenia you know, and if it is something like that then we can get you help, alright. It’s going to be okay.”

“No, no Eskild. It’s nothing like that.”

Eskild leans back in his chair, assessing Isak. “Isak,” he says fondly. “No matter what you tell me, you’re still my baby Jesus, alright? My baby gay.”

Beside him, Magnus grins an _I told you so_ grin. Sana frowns. “I know I can Eskild. It’s just I don’t really know how to explain it.”

“It’s always easier after you start.”

Isak pauses for a while, looking around at Magnus and Sana. Before he can start talking to Eskild though, Sana stands up abruptly. Her phone vibrates over and over again, texts flying in at a mile a minute.

“I have to go. Uh, something’s come up at home.”

“Is everything okay?” Magnus asks.

“Yeah, yeah, everything’s fine. Can I uh… tell you about it after it happens?” There’s a hopeful glimmer in Sana’s eye, something she’s quite clearly trying to quell down and make less noticeable, but suddenly the bond is humming with the feeling of hope.

Magnus shoots a look at Isak, grinning at him. Isak stifles a grin into the food in front of him. She hadn’t mentioned a word to anyone, choosing to say completely mum on the subject, but everyone could tell that there was someone in Sana’s life who was making her heart skip a beat every once in awhile. The only one who knew anything oddly enough was Mahdi, but he was as tight lipped as she was.

“Of course. You know where to find me when you’re ready to talk, honeybunches.”

“Don’t call me that,” Sana retorts, rolling her eyes. The effect of her tone is lost with the fondness that seeps through. She turns around to face Isak, placing her hand on his shoulder and forcing him to look up at her. “I might not approve of this whole telling people outside of us thing, but no matter what you have us and it’s all going to be okay.”

She gives him a tiny wave and with that she is gone, her thoughts back in Morocco with her body.

Magnus smiles wryly, curling up in the window box. “She’s right man. Everything’s gonna be fine. Just tell him. Rip it off like a bandaid.”

Isak takes a deep breath and clears his throat, bracing himself on the table. His stomach was a flurry with nerves, even worse than _that_ day in the kitchen. Coming out was scary, but it was nothing compared to telling someone something like this.

“So you remember the other week when I had that really bad headache? And how I went to that party, and I came home really out of it?”

Eskild hums noncommittally. “Yeah, what about it?”

Isak buries his face in his hands and rubs his eyes. “God, this is gonna sound really fucking weird but basically at the party I saw this boy in the bathtub who was actually in Cuba, not Norway and it turns out that- “Wait, you _hallucinated_ a boy?” Eskild interrupts, his eyes blown. “Isak, if you’re trying to tell me you’re schizophrenic, you know that’s okay, right? I’m not gonna love you any less because you have a mental illness.”

“I’m not schizophrenic, okay.” Isak breathes in heavily, avoiding meeting Eskild’s eyes. He takes a deep breath, deciding to change tacks completely. “Noora and I, we’re connected.”

Eskild’s eyes narrow. “What do you mean connected? And what’s this got to do with...”

“Noora and I, we are connected. Like our souls are connected. We’re part of a cluster. Me and Noora and like eight other people. We were born at the same moment in time, took the same first breath together. And now, we can like visit each other and see what we’re doing and feel what we are all feeling and share skills and I know that doesn’t really make much sense but it’s true I swear and…”

“Woah, baby Jesus slow down. Just breathe, and explain it to me more slowly.”

“They’re in my head. All nine of them. There’s Noora, the girl in the shower. She’s from London, but she lives in Madrid. Jonas, he’s from Cuba. Chris, from Japan. Vilde, from Russia. Eva, Australia. Magnus, from Germany. Mahdi, he’s from Chicago. Sana, she’s Moroccan. And uh, Even. He’s Dutch. He lives in Amsterdam.”

Isak can’t fight the blush that springs up on his cheeks when he mentions Even. Eskild grins. “Even huh?”

“I’m trying to explain to you the biggest secret in my life and all you can focus on is that I have a crush?” Isak says, raising his eyebrows and pointedly ignoring the way his heart flutters when he thinks about Even and his crush.

“Well sorry for having an interest in your love life, baby gay.” Eskild makes a _continue_ gesture with his hands. Isak reaches for his cup of tea on the table so he has something to hold on to to calm his nerves.

“I’m not hallucinating Eskild. This isn’t schizophrenia. I need you to understand that.”

There’s a pause for a second, before Eskild talks again. His voice is soft, reassuring and without judgement. It calms Isak more than he can say. “Okay. I believe you. But explain it to me.”

“They’re like a pressure in the back of your head. They’re like always there. So after Jonas it was Sana who I met, and she helped me out in one of my mid-years, and Vilde, who’s like a Russian ballet dancer, well I watched a bit of her dance practise; she’s really good.”

Eskild cuts him off with a wave of his hands. “So, you can see each other?”

“Yeah. We still don’t know how it works really. Not properly. If you’re in trouble, or you’re having like an issue, usually the person you need to see to help you will just kinda be there. You can visit even when you don’t need them, but that takes a little more concentration.”

Eskild ponders that for a second. “So, if you wanted to, you could see Noora right now?”

Isak turns his head to see Noora curled up in a ball, sitting on the floor of the shower. The water has turned cold now, just running over her body. She doesn’t acknowledge Isak, just stays staring at the bottom of the tub and watching the water pool around her feet.

He turns back to Eskild. “Yeah. It’s easier now because she’s distracted. Something happened in Madrid, Eskild. Something really bad. She’s gonna need a place to stay for a while.”

“Is she okay?”

“No. But she will be.”

Eskild sits back in his chair, taking another sip from his tea. “Fuck,” he curses under his breath. “Where the fuck is she going to sleep?”

“It’s fine, she can come in with me. We share a headspace, a bed isn’t that much of a step up from that,” Isak says offhandedly, turning to look at Magnus next to him when the conversation with Eskild dies down.

“I told you so,” Magnus says, a million watt grin on his face. He flourishes his hands in the air dramatically, gesturing to Eskild. “Everything is now okay.”

Isak grins back at him.

Suddenly, Eskild looks up from his phone, a curious look in his eyes. “Who made me these eggs?”

“What?”

“Who made me these eggs?”

“Uh… not me?” Isak would feel more guilty if it wasn’t for the grin on Eskild’s face.

“I gathered that one Isak. Which one of your little headmates was it then?”

“Even?” He says it like a question, but they both know it isn’t. It’s obvious to Isak the moment makes the connection, that the Even who made Eskild the eggs was the same Even which Isak couldn’t seem to disguise his feelings for.

“Even huh?” Eskild waggles his eyebrows at Isak. Isak can’t stop the blush from crawling up high on his cheeks as he waves a hand in front of Eskild’s face, trying to get him to stop his teasing. Eskild just laughs.  “Like, the Even? Is Even here now?”

“No, no, Even’s not here. But Magnus is. He’s the German one. He cooked the sausages from a few nights back. Sana was here for a bit too, but she left a while back. We think she’s seeing a boy.”

Suddenly Eskild’s eyes widen. “Oh my god! None of the food you’ve cooked in this house you’ve actually cooked yourself. It’s just the people in your head?”

“Basically.” Isak shrugs at him. Eskild stares at him, his face covered with mock offense. “What? I told you I couldn’t cook. Think of it this way. I’m just utilising the resources I have available to me.”

Eskild rolls his eyes, tutting in mock disappointment. “ _You_ were the one who was supposed to be contributing to the house, not your little head people. However, I am willing to allow a compromise.”

“Hm?”

“For the duration of time that Noora is staying with us, you can give your cooking duties to her in exchange for you doing one of her chores.”

Noora looks up at him from where she is. She’s out of the shower now, her hair wrapped up in a towel. There’s the faintest hint of a smile dancing on her lips. “He’s giving me chores?”

“Eskild’s got a _thing_ about making sure everyone does their share.”

Eskild looks up at him. He shrugs. “Noora’s surprised you’re giving her chores is all.”

“Well she’s living here isn’t she? Family works together to get the job done.”

“Fuck I hate your weird Bob the Builder mantra.” Isak can feel the way Noora processes Eskild’s words too, the casual mention of her as part of their family. There’s no way that it can be anything but true, the offhanded nature of it meaning that she is a part of it. Her eyes well up with tears as she looks at them.

“I’ll be out in a bit. Just uh, give me a second alright?”

“Sure thing.”

Noora’s always seemed a lot older than him, even though they were born at the exact same moment. She’s always been the stable one, with her independence and her relationship all the way down to the way she held herself. And here she is, standing right before him and crumbling.

Isak kind of knew that it had to happen eventually, but nothing would have been able to prepare him for the reality of it. He moves back to safer topics instead, because his heart already hurts too much when he thinks about Noora.

“Magnus was your biggest supporter, you know.” There was a small pause before Isak adds, “Like that you would believe me. About all of this.”

Eskild grins. “Where is he?”

When Isak points over to the air where Magnus is, Eskild turns around with a flourish. “Well, my German friend. Thank you very much for your faith in me. And for your truly spectacular sausages.”

Magnus just grins back. “Danke schön.”

Eskild pulls a face, turning back to look at Isak. “That wasn’t Norwegian. Do you realise that _you_ just said German words? Like the words came out of your mouth?”

“You heard me speak German?”

“Yeah.”

“Well technically I didn’t say it. Magnus did.”

Eskild grins wryly. “It’s weird having other languages come out of your mouth. It actually makes you seem intelligent for once.”

“Fuck off,” Isak says, reaching over the kitchen table to shove Eskild in the shoulder.  “I’ll have you know I’m pulling a six in biology.”

“Probably because one of your cluster people is good at it.”

“Excuse me, I can get a six on my own thank you very much.” Isak tries to frown, but the smile that ghosts over his lips gives him away. Eskild just stares at him until he relents, mock offense written all over his face. “Fine. Sana’s better at biology than me. But I could still get a six all by myself if I wanted to.”

Eskild leans back in his chair, puts his hands behind his head and grins slyly. “No no, of course you could. You’re just making sure you use all the resources that are available to you.”

There’s silence for a while, as Eskild finishes off his eggs.

“So, you believe me then?”

“Of course I believe you Isak. I’m never not going to believe you.”

Another silence settles over the room.

Eskild has done a lot for him over the years. Let him move in only two days after their first meeting, covered his rent in the first few weeks when Isak had no way of contacting his dad, cooked for him, comforted him, all the things that families do. And now, he’s sitting across from Isak and completely and genuinely accepting this crazy thing that Isak is shoving on him.

“I love you,” he says softly, meeting Eskild’s eyes. Eskild smiles back at him.

“I love you too baby gay. Now come on, tell me more about these people in your head.”

He does. It’s so refreshing to tell someone else about these people that he loves, someone who doesn’t inhabit his head.

It’s a while before Noora comes down from the bathroom, her hair wrapped up in a towel. She is drowning in one of Isak’s old sweatshirts, her face pale and drawn out. She silently takes the cup of tea that is offered to her by Eskild, sitting down next to him at the table.

Isak smiles sadly at her. “Do you wanna talk about it?”

Eskild makes a move to get up, but Noora waves a hand to get him to sit back down. “You can stay. It’s okay. The same thing that happened to you happened to me anyway.”

Eskild shoots her a confused look. “What do you mean?”

“I’m scared? I don’t remember how to live without him?”

She’s crying again, her voice cracking under the pressure. Eskild immediately reaches over and hugs her as tight as he can. “Hey, hey, darling girl. It’s okay now. It’s okay now.”

Noora just sobs harder into his shoulder. “I’m so scared.”

 

-

 

The three of them end up curled on Eskild’s bed, Noora asleep between them. Only when Isak is sure that she is dead to the world does he finally tell Eskild what happened, why Noora is here.

“Why us though? Why come to us?” Eskild shakes his head quickly, realising how that sounds. “I’m glad she’s out of there, don’t get me wrong, but why Norway? Amsterdam is closer?”

Isak shrugs. “Cheap flight? Also you have a penchant for runaways.”

That makes Eskild smile. He’s still running his hands through her hair, trying to soothe her in her sleep. “What do we do with her?”

“She can sleep with me for a while. I don’t mind.”

“I mean what do we tell Linn?”

“The truth. If you think she’ll believe me, then the truth.”

“I don’t think Linn is likely to care.”

“Fair point.”

“Is she okay?”

Isak looks up to see Mahdi sitting on the end of his bed, cross legged with his laptop on his lap. “Yeah.”

“What happened?”

“Chris and Sana did it all. I don’t know what William did to push her over the edge, but within an hour she was out of there and up in the air to you.”

“Why not to Sana?”

“Parents. All of us still live with our parents except you and Even, and Even said he was too busy with school I think? Sounded a little bullshit to me, but whatever, we’re kind of letting that one slide. Plus you have Eskild, so like she’d be in good hands.”

Isak turns to Eskild, who’s watching Isak talk with a weird look on his face. “See Eskild, she’s here because you’re famous for adopting runaways.”

“Who said that?”

Isak gestures to the foot of the bed. “Mahdi.”

“Ah, Chicago,” Eskild says, his eyes lighting up in recognition. “What’s it like over there in America?”

“Yeah cool, I guess,” Mahdi replies awkwardly. Isak can faintly feel the weird way his mouth moves along with Mahdi’s words. The answer is a bit plain, but what Mahdi really thinks of America is not really a first conversation topic.

“I’ve gotta dash but… tell her we’re all here for her okay?”

“Okay.”

Mahdi disappears as quickly as he came, because even though it’s like later in Oslo, Mahdi is in the middle of class, and he has to at least try and focus.

“Is he gone?” Eskild says after Isak is silent for a moment.

“Yeah. He just wanted to check on Noora.”

Eskild’s face softens, his face breaking out into a small smile. “I’m glad you have people Isak.”

 

-

 

Noora walks him to school now. It was Eskild’s idea, a way to get her out of the house and exploring Oslo for herself. It’s even nicer for Isak to have the company, to talk to someone who wasn’t Elias and that he actually felt like he could have a conversation about something that matters with.

It’s been going well for a week or so, no sign of Elias or Emma as Noora dropped him off at the gate. She could feel the same panic that he did every time that they approached the school gate, the fear that they would come around the corner and see him and Noora together. He knew what the assumption would be, that Isak had managed to score a hot new Spanish girlfriend who was staying with him over the break. And he knew that he could play off that if he wanted, tell them that Noora was his girlfriend to get them off of his back.

But for the first time, Isak didn’t want to do that anymore. The people in his life that mattered the most to him knew the truth now, that he was gay, and the way that they had openly and readily accepted him for the thing that scared Isak the most made him realise how now it didn’t matter what Elias and Emma thought about him. He had a family all tucked away in his head, and he had a family in Eskild and Linn. That was enough for him.

He was a semester away from graduation, so keeping his head down and finishing out the year wasn’t going to be the hardest thing to do. Once he was out of there anyway, it would be easy enough to never see anyone from high school ever again and that was it. Now all he had to decide was whether he actually wanted to come out or if he just wanted to slowly but decisively stop speaking to them until eventually he left and went off into the real world.

So on this morning, as Noora and him stood at the gate, she whispered a soft “you can do this” in his ear as they hugged goodbye. There was a wolf whistle, a low holler, and Isak and Noora split apart to see Elias leaning against the wall, a grin on his face. Eva, who is standing next to them, sticks her middle finger up at him. This translates to Noora doing it. Elias’ grin doesn’t falter.

“Elias doesn’t matter okay?” She says, forcing him to look at her in the eyes.

Eva grins beside them both, waggling her eyebrows. “I mean, if you want Noora could be like the hottest beard you could ever hope for, so….” She trails off, elbowing Noora in the side. She does a little shimmy on the spot, making Isak smile despite it all.

“If you want a pretend girlfriend Is, then goddamn wouldn’t she be the best one ever?” Eva says with a shimmy. Noora laughs, nodding in agreement.

“Only if that’s what you want Isak.”

Isak shrugs noncommittally, looking down at the pavement. “Thanks Eva. Noora. I love you guys.”

“We love you too. I’ll see you this afternoon yeah?”

“Yeah.”

He salutes her as they both walk away, before taking a deep breath and spinning around to face the Nissen courtyard. He’s alone now, just him against the entirety of Nissen school.

“What I wouldn’t give to have a beard as hot as Noora,” Magnus says.

“Magnus, firstly you’re bisexual, so you can’t really have a beard, and secondly, you’re out and proud and you have a crush on a boy who really obviously likes you back, so please for the love of God can you just shut the fuck up,” Jonas says, rubbing his eyes in exasperation.

“You got this bro,” Mahdi says, slinging him in the shoulder lightly. “It’s gonna be fine.”

Isak retracts his thought from earlier. He isn’t alone, he has his boys with him.

“If you guys are shit at comebacks, I’m cutting you off for good, you understand?”

“Sir yes sir!”  Jonas retorts with a mock salute, following Isak into the school gates of Nissen.

Elias is the first person he sees when he makes it into the locker hall, somehow managing to have disappeared from the front of the school where Isak saw him first and make it to here without Isak realising, and he is now standing surrounded by all of his friends. Isak freezes, but Magnus with all of his lack of care about anyone else’s opinion just strides on by, opening up Isak’s locker and completely ignoring Elias’ calls.

Elias isn’t dismayed by Isak’s attempts however, pushing out of his circle of friends and over to where Isak is standing. “Come on Isak, don’t ignore your friends.”

“I don’t,” Isak deadpans, now intently focused on his locker. He’s handing his books out to Magnus, not caring what this would look like to Elias.

“Yes you are,” Elias says, moving in to put Isak in one of his typical headlocks. Mahdi, for all his usual passive demeanour, is there immediately, ducking out of the way of his arm and shoving a flat palm on Elias’ shoulder to push him off.

Elias looks a bit startled for half a second, but that is immediately replaced by the bravado that he always sports. “Wow Isak, you’ve been practising.”

He then goes to move in again, but Isak sidesteps him and moves down the hallway, past Elias’ friends, whom have barely ever spoken a word to him. They don’t say anything now either. He’s on the home stretch out of the corridor, Jonas, Magnus and Mahdi walking behind him.

And then from around the corner, flanked by two of her friends, comes Emma, a furious look on her face.

“Who the fuck has been walking you to school every day,” she says, shoving him in the chest. Isak turns around, shooting a look at Elias, who only grins wolfishly, holding up his phone. Fucking Elias.

“Did he fucking text her,” Jonas seethes.

“That fucking bastard,” Magnus says. Mahdi has to step in front of him to hold him back and make sure that Isak doesn’t move with him.

“Noora,” Isak says simply, “She’s a friend of mine from Spain.”

“Yeah, a friend,” Emma says, rolling her eyes.

Isak nods. “A friend, that’s what I said, yes. You don’t have to worry about her though.”

Emma gives Isak a skeptical look.

He feels as though he’s about to buzz out of his skin, feels a nervous flurry egging him on, feels as though this is the moment he’s been waiting for. To finally get Emma off of his back. The words are right there, on the tip of his tongue and there’s nothing there holding them back from spilling forth.

“You don’t, really,” Isak confirms. “I don’t even like girls.”

A bubble of laughter rises up, and he doesn’t bother trying to hold it back. It’s out before he can register it, and suddenly a huge smile is breaking out across his face. He feels well and truly free now, like there’s nothing holding him back, nothing dragging him down. Isak thinks that if he didn’t have Jonas and Magnus and Mahdi there anchoring him down he would’ve floated away.

“What?” Emma demands, fixing Isak with a confused expression. “I’m sorry, did you just say you _don’t like girls_?” She asks incredulously.

“That’s exactly what I said, Emma. I don’t like girls, I like _boys_ , I’m gay,” Isak repeats, the feeling of weightlessness only increasing.

Emma scoffs. “I know what it means, Isak,” she snaps. “I just don’t get it. You like _me_ though.”

Isak can’t help the snort he lets out. “No, I really don’t,” he replies, shaking his head. “Look, I’m sorry if it ever came across that way— which I really don’t know how… I wasn’t exactly subtle— but I’ve never liked you. I’m sorry.”

Emma stares at Isak for a moment, and he can see the cogs turning in her head. She looks as though she wants to say something, but every time she opens her mouth, she seems to think better of it and stays quiet. Finally she seems to find the words she wants. “Are you sure?” She asks, and she sounds so small that Isak almost feels bad for her. Almost.

“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life,” Isak answers. “I have… there’s a boy. And I really like him, and there’s nothing I’m more sure about than him.”

In front of him, Emma deflates. Her jaw clenches and she hoists her chin higher into the air, trying to make it seem as though she’s not as affected by this as she is. “I hope you’re happy then,” she says, her voice tight, only a little bitterness leaking into it.

Before Isak could say anything more, Emma turns on her heel and stalks off, leaving him standing there in the middle of the courtyard. He doesn’t even turn back to look at Elias, even though Isak knows that his jaw must be at least through the first layer of the Earth’s crust by now.

Isak bites down on his lip, the giant smile still there. Once Emma disappears from sight he looks towards Jonas and Magnus and Mahdi, that light happiness flooding through his body once more.

“I think she finally got the hint,” Jonas comments, chuckling a bit.

Isak laughs again, out loud this time. “Yeah. Yeah, I think she did.” His veins are still thrumming with energy, like he’s a livewire. He never thought that coming out would make him feel this good, this _proud_ of himself. But there he is. “I feel on top of the world.”

 

-

 

Isak’s craving _lutefisk._ He’s craving it so much that he’s woken up in a cold sweat just thinking about it. It’s the middle of the night, nowhere near Christmas and he’s never really liked it in the first place but he’s craving it all the same.

His mind is absolutely racing now, in a different enough way to when his insomnia acts up that he can tell the difference. He’s all jittery, desperate to move around and satisfy his craving, which is in direct opposition to how heavy his bones feel on all those other sleepless nights.

This feeling though, this feeling he likes.

On inspection, the fridge doesn’t have anything which looks even vaguely appealing, and a rummage through the rest of the kollektiv’s cupboards yields no results either, which leaves him in the state of hungry and craving something that is only found in his country and that none of the members of his cluster can give him when he needs it.

He climbs out to the balcony and pulls himself up on the railing, sitting so that his legs are dangling over the edge. It’s not that far down to the bottom. If he jumped it would speed up the time between now and getting his _lutefisk,_ so there’s that as a positive.

He’s suddenly aware that he isn’t alone on this balcony. Magnus is leaning back against the railing, his hands gripping either side of his body to steady him.

“Have you ever tried lutefisk?” Isak says, bypassing the greeting formalities. Maybe Magnus could help him in his quest right now.

“How are you feeling Isak,” Magnus sidesteps his question and asks, his eyes wide and his voice slightly panicked.

A confused smile breaks out over his face. “I’m feeling great Mags! What’s the problem.”

“This isn’t right,” Magnus says. “I’m feeling it too, especially after that thing with Elias today and…”

The smile starts to drop from his face, leaving only the confusion. “Feeling what? My food craving?”

Magnus’ concern isn’t sitting right with him. In fact, Isak doesn’t think it should be there at all. What’s wrong with his midnight craving for lutefisk?

“Don’t you feel a little––” Magnus pauses, staring intently at him. “A little one track minded?”

“It’s fine, I’ve just got a really bad craving.”

“For a food that you hate!”

“Magnus I really don’t see your point here. I’m fine.”

“Fine. Will you just get down from the balcony please.”

“But––”

“Please.”

“Fine.” He shakes his head in exasperation as he swings his legs back over the banister and plants his feet firmly back on the balcony. Isak doesn’t understand what the big fuss is anyway. All he wants is some fucking lutefisk, is that too much to ask.

“Just go back to bed, Isak,” Magnus says, running a hand through his hair. He disappears straight after that, leaving Isak with a sinking feeling that maybe he should follow Magnus’ advice for once.

 

-

 

Another whole day passes where he feels like this. It’s a strange day, because he doesn’t really see any of the cluster. And that’s not for a lack of trying either, because he specifically remembers making a promise to Eva that in exchange for the whole Vegemite incident she would try _lutefisk._ Or was it surströmming? Isak isn’t sure.

Even though he manages to satisfy his craving by finding some of Eskild’s stash in the freezer, everything still feels high. He’s even flipped Elias off once in the schoolyard without feeling any emotional repercussions from it.

And then suddenly, it’s not.

He sat up abruptly in bed, covered in sweat with his heart racing. The remnants of his own nightmares weren’t in his mind, so it wasn’t his nightmare that forced him awake at this god forsaken hour of the morning. Isak reached out across the bond, looking for the source of the problem.

It was easy enough to search around the bond, poke at the places in his head where seven other people resided. Isak turned around to look at his alarm clock, which was flashing 11:37 in bold, red numbers. For 11:37 at night, something was wrong. There was too much flurry, too much frenzy in his head for a time that was usually calm. Something was so very wrong.

His sleep addled brain was slowly coming alive, waking up and coming online. He could feel everyone’s fear, as it seeped into him and begun to cling to his bones.

But there was a new kind of sadness that was sitting firmly inside him, something unfamiliar to him. He has felt sad before, everyone has, but there was something different about this, the depth of it bigger than any sort of usual sadness.

Instinctively, he reaches out for Even, the one person that can make him feel calm no matter what.

Fuck.

Terror pounds through his veins as he pushes again, in the place in his head where Even’s comforting presence should be. Still no rebound. Isak rubs his eyes, trying to force himself to wake up and to push again. Nothing. How could he not be there?”

“Even’s missing,” Chris was sitting on the end of his bed, worry all over her face.

“What? How?”

“I don’t know. He’s just gone.”

“How can you be gone?”

Suddenly, Sana appears next to Chris. “You can shut us out if you try hard enough.”

Isak immediately has the burning desire to know how she managed to come across that information, but lets it slide in favour of a more important topic. “What about the past couple days?”

“What do you mean?”

“Didn’t anyone else feel it? The way that everything seemed to be going so fast.” There’s a murmur of agreement throughout the cluster, but it’s Magnus that moves first. He suddenly turns away and looks off into the distance, watching something move around. He grins, says something in German, and turns back to face them all, a pondering look on his face.

“What is it Mags?” Jonas asks, staring at him curiously.

“What if… what if he isn’t doing it consciously. What if he has like no energy at all, so he can’t even support our bond?”

Vilde scoffs, “How would someone have that little energy?”

There’s a pause, as the three of them turn and look at Magnus expectantly, waiting for an answer. Isak can almost see the wheels turning in his head as he tries to work out how to explain whatever it is to them.

“Do you guys know about my mom?” Magnus says, changing his tack abruptly.

Isaks brow furrows. “What about her?”

“She’s bipolar. I think I’ve already told you that. It’s not like a bad thing, it just means that sometimes she has times when she’s really up and times when she’s really down. She just came in, that’s why I thought about it.”

Eva frowns. “What does this have to do with Even blocking us out?”

“When my mum is depressed, she doesn’t really have the energy to hold a conversation, let alone be around anyone,” Magnus says. “So what if Even’s the same?”

Jonas’ brow furrows. “So what, Even’s depressed or bipolar or what?”

“Not necessarily any of those. You can have episodes with all different mental illnesses; depression, schizophrenia, uh… others.”

Isak stiffens. “Episode?”

“Yeah, an episode. When you’re mentally ill, it isn’t like a constant thing. It comes and goes, and when it’s like there, it’s called an episode.”

Isak can feel his throat tightening, the way that the world feels like its closing in on him. He looks down in his lap, shutting his eyes to concentrate on his breathing. He’s startled out of his thoughts by Jonas’ hand on his arm, looking up to see him peering back at Isak.

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Isak swallows the lump in his throat and tries to pretend that he didn’t just have an almost panic attack. “My mum’s uh, she’s schizophrenic, so I get it.”

It’s a testament to how well the people in this room know him that no one reacts, making him feel like what he just said was just another normal thing. Chris grabs his hand and squeezes it. He squeezes back.

“So you think… Even is just having an episode and that’s why he’s shutting us out,” Eva asks.

“It doesn’t necessarily have to be an episode either. He could just be having like a really bad day and not have the mental energy to be around us right now. I mean, you said it yourself Noora. Even isn’t the type of person to shut us out on purpose like that.”

Something in Isak’s chest lifts at those words. Not on purpose. He could live with that. But as soon as the feeling in his chest lifted, it was replaced with worry, strengthened by all the cluster’s worry. “How do we know if he’s okay?”

“Does anyone have his mobile number or something?” Chris asks. When everyone shakes their head, she rolls her eyes. “Did no one think about that?”

“That’s a bit of a menial thing to have when we basically share a consciousness,” Jonas replies wryly.

Isak tentatively sticks up his hand. “I actually do. Have his number I mean.”

The whole cluster turns to look at him in one simultaneous action. Their coordination is actually kind of scary.

“Text him then? That way when he sees it he can just reply,” Magnus says. They spend a few minutes together coming up with a text for Even, eventually settling with:

 

> _hey even, we hope you’re okay but if you’re not we’re here for you. no pressure <3_

Isak half expects Even to reply instantly, as he always does when Isak sends him a meme or a photo of something in his life that reminded him of Even. The longer he stares at his phone, the more he realises that that isn’t what’s going to happen this time.

“So we just wait?” Vilde asks, a twinge of panic in her voice.

Sana nods. “We just wait.”

 

-

 

It’s been four days now. No sign of Even. Not even a reply to his text. It’s been taking all of Isak’s control not to try to force his way into Even’s head and into his space, and only because that was what they mutually agreed on as a cluster.

He also knows that someone has organised a roster of people to keep him busy. It was supposed to be for all of them, but he hasn’t exactly been subtle about his crush on Even, and so ended up mostly being for him.

Right now it was Eva keeping him company, reruns of The Bachelor Australia playing on the TV in front of him. She had gotten him hooked on this trashy TV show after that night where she first showed it to him, although he would never admit it. Not to anyone. Well, anyone but Eva.

“I fucking hate Simone,” Isak says, twirling the spoon in his mouth to get all the ice-cream off of it. “Her accent is annoying.”

“Well at least she didn’t pussy out and actually jumped out of the plane,” Eva says back. “Imagine how much worse it would have been for her had she gone back and not done it at all. All the girls would be on her like crazy.”

“Yeah, fuck. Would you ever go skydiving?”

“Fuck no,” Eva says aghastly. “There is no way in hell you are getting me up in the air to jump out of a fucking plane. No fucking way.”

“Hello baby gay, I am home! I bring with me good tidings!”

“Hi Eskild,” Isak choruses, rolling his eyes fondly at Eva. He looks up from the TV to see Eskild poking his head around through the doorway, staring intently at the screen.

“The Bachelor... Australia? That means Eva! Hello my dear, how are you doing?”

“Good as ever, Eskild,” she says back, grinning at him. Isak can faintly hear the words coming out of his mouth, which is still the oddest feeling.

“Still weird,” Eskild mutters, his head disappearing around the corner and back into the kitchen.

“What were the uh, good tidings?” Isak asks after a second.

“Oh, oh yes. 2 for 1 sale on wine. I got six bottles! Six!” Eskild sounds way too hysterical about bottles of wine, which causes Eva and Isak to giggle uncontrollably.

They watch for a bit more, before suddenly Eva gets a glint in her eye. She turns around to face him, grinning uncontrollably “You have to get him watching the Bachelorette Australia. Eskild. There is so much drama and the men are dreamy. Well, not the ones from the most recent season. There’s only one decent looking one in the whole bunch.”

“I thought Australian men were supposed to be hot?”

“They are. Just the really hot guys don’t really tend to go on trashy dating shows.”

“Hm, fair point. Matty J’s pretty good looking though.”

“Oh hell yeah he is.”

It goes on like that for a while, comfortable chatter filling the room as they talk about the trashy reality show that is somehow both terrible and incredibly entertaining at the same time.

And just like that, it happens.

He doesn’t notice it at first, because the contented feeling that settles around him like a second skin feels so natural to him that he doesn’t think anything of it. It’s only when he notices Eva next to him freeze up that he realises that this contentment isn’t because of her presence. It’s because Even has opened up his mind again.

Even was back.

Isak turns around to face Eva, his eyes wide with hope. She is quick to quell it. “If Magnus was right, then we can’t go and all bombard him at once.”

“She’s right,” Jonas says, appearing on the couch and propping his legs immediately up on Isak’s lap, leaning back against the arm rest. “If Even really has been just super exhausted over the last couple of days then having us all rock up at once is gonna be super overwhelming.”

Eskild suddenly pokes his head around the corner again. “You were having a rather frantic discussion with yourself Isak. Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, yeah. Everything’s great. Even’s just opened himself back up to the cluster actually.”

“Oh that’s great! Is Even here now?”

“No actually. Eva, Jonas and Noora are though.”

Eskild’s face breaks out into a grin, a twinkle in his eye. “Noora! Can you bring home some rice milk, we are all out.”

Noora smiles. Isak just rolls his eyes. “Although I feel like you are abusing our psychic connection by doing that, she has said yes, she can bring home rice milk. But you have to pay her for it.”

“Of course, Nooramor,” Eskild says with a flourish. “Anyway, is there anything I can help you guys with?”

“Uh, well, Even’s just come back and we don’t really know what to do. Like we want to go and see him, but Magnus was probably right about the whole tiredness thing and so we don’t want to overwhelm him but…”

“Why don’t you just go?”

Isak’s face crinkles up in confusion. “What?”

“I mean it Isak. Why don’t you just go and see Even first?”

“Me? Why me?”

Jonas nudges him in the side. “Because he likes you, dipshit.”

Eva giggles.

Noora, with her endless composure, is the one to respond. “Yeah, I think Eskild’s right. I think Isak should go and see Even first and then he can let us know how he’s doing and whether he’s up for more visitors.”

“Do your little headpeople agree?” When Isak pointedly doesn’t respond to him, instead electing to just stare at the floor, Eskild grins and disappears from view again. “I’m just full of good ideas!”

 

-

 

Even’s sleeping when he finally works up the courage to visit. It takes him a while to spot a figure in between the lump of doona and blankets and pillows, but the giveaway is the little tuft of hair that pokes out at the top, resting gently on the pillow. Isak can’t tell if he’s actually asleep or faking it so that he doesn’t have to talk to him.

Either way, Isak moves around to the other side of the bed, lying on top of the covers next to him gently. If he concentrates hard enough, he can feel Even’s breathing through the bond, and he forces himself to copy it in order to steel his nerves.

He doesn’t feel like he’s been laying there for long, but after a while he feels Even stir, his eyes appearing in the opening of his cocoon. Isak lets a small smile ghost lightly over his face, moving his hand up so it’s cupping Even’s cheek.

“You’re not leaving,” Even says simply, shutting his eyes again.

“Do you want me to?”

“No.”

“Okay then.”

Even shifts in so he’s closer to Isak, turning himself around so that they’re facing each other, noses almost touching. Isak moves his hand so that he can run it through Even’s hair, gently coaxing out the knots which have built up over the last couple of days.

“I didn’t mean to. Does everyone know that?”

“We know.”

“Who…”

“Magnus. His mum’s bipolar.”

Even pales at that.

“It’s okay Even. Whatever it is, it’s okay.”

“I’m bipolar.”

“Okay.”

“I didn’t know how much it would affect you guys. I’m sorry.”

Even pulls away from him, untangling their fingers and moving onto his back. Isak’s whole body aches, and he wishes more than anything that there was something that he could do to make this better for Even. Rationally he knows that just his presence was enough, but that doesn’t stop him from wishing.

“I just know this isn’t going to work. Any of this. Being a part of the cluster. Being in a relationship with you.”

Isak tries to quell the hope that rises up in his chest when Even mentions the idea of them being in a relationship, and tries to focus on the fact that Even is talking about cutting himself off from the cluster. “Why do you say that?”

Even shifts a little so he can look Isak dead in the eyes. “Because it’s true. I’ll just hurt you and then you’ll hate me.”

He doesn’t know what he feels anymore. What he’s supposed to be doing, how he’s supposed to be making Even feel better. But it’s the way that Even only talks about hating him, like he’s the one thing that matters most, makes him realise that he was the only one that could do this.

“Even,” he instead says softly. “I could never hate you.”

Even scoffs, averting his eyes. He stares up at the ceiling blankly. Isak moves his hand back down to force Even to look at him.

“Even, I need you to listen to me very clearly when I say this. We are your cluster. Fuck that, we’re family. And we love you, no matter what fucked up shit happens in your brain sometimes. No matter what you want to do, whether that’s cut yourself off during your episodes or not, we are gonna support you. _I’m_ gonna support you.”

Some of the tension seeps out of Even’s body, as he shuffles back over the bed so that he’s more in Isak’s space. “Okay.”

He says it with a sort of finality, and Isak knows that he still doesn’t believe him but he drops the topic anyway, moving his hand from Even’s cheek to cup his shoulders and bring him even closer to him. Their faces are so close that one wrong move would mean that they were touching.

“We’re gonna play a little game now, just me and you,” Isak whispers, almost so quietly that if Even wasn’t in his head he wouldn’t be able to hear him.

“A game huh?”

“Yeah, a game. It’s called _Isak and Even, minute by minute._ We’re just gonna take everything one minute at a time. Is that chill?”

“That’s chill.”

“So what are we going to do in this minute.”

Isak pretends to think about it, ignores his heart which is beating at a mile a minute. “In this minute, we’ll kiss.”

“Okay,” Even says, smiling a little now.

“Okay.”

This is his first kiss with Even. It’s his first kiss with a boy full stop. And even though he’s physically more than 1,300 kilometres away from him, the way that this makes him feel is like nothing has ever before.

He just lets Even curl into his chest, properly this time, shifting his arms to cocoon Even inside. Even shuts his eyes against his chest, his breathing evening out.

 

-

 

He wakes up with Noora curled up next to him on his bed, her whole body shrunk in on itself. She’s been coming in a lot recently, but she never starts off here. Sometime in the night she will gently tiptoe in, pull the sheets back and curl up into herself, trying to take up as little space as possible. Every time she does Isak’s heart breaks a little more, and the hate for the man that did this to her grows exponentially.

He tries not to move, but the slightest twitch of his arm to make himself more comfortable has her jerking awake, her flight or flight response kicking in. When she realises where she is, she becomes more unsure of herself, running her hands through her hair a few times to try and calm her nerves.

Isak tries to project _calmcalmcalm_ through the bond, but her anxiety is a lot stronger and there isn’t much that he can do other than hold her hand and wait for her to relax. Noora breathes in deeply in and out, in and out, and leans back against the wall, shutting her eyes. Isak can see how tired she looks, the way it clings to her like a second skin.

“How is he?” She eventually settles on. “Is he okay?”

Isak nods slowly, staring up at her. “He will be.”

“What happened?”

“Uh… I don’t think I should be the one to tell you. It’s kind of Even’s thing, not mine,” he says. Isak pushes himself up so that he’s sitting next to Noora, their shoulders touching. Noora instinctively reaches for his hand, and he doesn’t protest as she grips it. Her head comes down to rest on his shoulder as she pauses for a while, letting the words wash over her.

“Is it bad?”

Isak shrugs, looking down at his fidgeting hands. “No? It’s just kind of a thing.”

“Okay.”

He looks down to see Even at the foot of the bed, sitting there with his legs crossed, sipping a cup of steaming tea. Isak smiles softly at him. Noora looks around for whatever he is smiling at, but her eyes don’t focus.

“Is he here? I can’t see him?” She asks. Even looks down at his tea. Isak can feel the guilt of not being able to support Noora in his head wash over him, and he reaches out to steady Even, resting his hand gently on his knee.

“Yeah. Magnus was right, he’s just really tired. I don’t think he has the energy to see more than one person right now.”

“Oh. Hey Even. I hope you feel better soon.” He looks back up at her and tries. “I’ll uh, go see if Eskild needs any help with breakfast.”

It’s a flimsy excuse, considering it’s 7:30 in the morning and there is no way Eskild would be up before 10 any day of the week, but it gets her out of the room and gives Even the space he needs. Isak doesn’t know how he managed to get the most amazing and understanding people for headmates, but somehow he did, and he doesn’t want to question the universe for the gift he got.

“How are you doing?”

“I’m okay. It’s almost over now anyway.

“The episode?”

Even smiles faintly into his tea. “Did Magnus tell you about it?”

“Kind of. I did my reading too, but none of that is as good as you explaining to me what it means for you.”

Even entangles his fingers with Isak’s. The way that he is looking at him makes Isak’s chest tighten up, the soft elation of having someone look at you like they never want to look away

“Most of the time my brain is okay. But sometimes, I go really fast and sometimes I go really slow.”

“Was that just bipolar for dummies? I can handle it you know, the specifics of it all.”

Even huffs. “I know you can, just… I don’t really know how else to describe it. It’s complicated.”

Isak thinks back to the Good Day, where even though it was just average it still felt like everything was going his way. “It’s okay, I think I already understand.” At Even’s confused look, Isak adds, “You projected a lot, when you were manic I think. So while I’ll never fully understand what it’s like, because it’s your brain, but I kind of understand a bit of it.”

Even ducks his head back down. Isak shuffles a bit closer and puts his hand underneath Even’s chin to make him look at him. “Hey, it’s okay, alright? You can’t control your…”

Isak takes a deep breath, steeling himself for the words that are about to come out of his mouth. Images of his mother flash in his mind, the way she would scream at nothing for hours and the way he hated her for it. The guilt wells up in his stomach as he thinks about all of the things he blamed her for that he shouldn’t have.

“You can’t control your illness, okay?”

Even leans his head on Isak’s shoulder. Isak can feel the wet patch beginning to grow, but he can’t find it in himself to care.

Noora pokes her head back in after a few minutes of them just sitting there, asking if they want any of Eskild’s breakfast. She looks exhausted, and Isak can feel that she had a sleepless night tossing and turning with worry about everything, both William and Even playing major roles. He can’t blame her.

Isak shakes his head at the offer. He can tell that Noora can’t see Even next to him still, because she shuts the door without asking him too.

He turns his head around slightly, pressing a soft kiss into Even’s hair. “Why can’t she see you?”

“Everyone else is heavy,” Even says, his hands fidgeting slightly in his lap. “You’re not.”

That simple statement sets Isak’s mind racing, ideas of the future springing to the forefront even though he promised that they would be taking this minute by minute.

 

-

 

When they wake up they migrate to the kitchen, Isak’s hunger pushing them out of the safety of his room. He halfheartedly gets out the ingredients to a cheese toastie, while Even flits around the kitchen behind him, rummaging around in the drawer for something. His energy makes Isak feel optimistic, an improvement from the lethargic way he was feeling this morning.

“Do you want a cup of tea?”

“I don’t drink tea?”

“No, but it helps to hold a steaming mug of something while you talk about hard topics.” Isak doesn’t know what they have left to talk about, but he knows that this is Even’s way of letting him know that there is still something else.

“I don’t think we own a kettle,” Isak confesses. Even lets out a small chuckle.

“Do you have a saucepan?”

“What do you need a saucepan for?” The genuine confusion makes Even grin, properly this time, and bigger than anything Isak has seen in days.

“I’ll show you. Come on.”

Noora, in her perceptiveness, made sure that the kitchen was vacant when they got here. He feels through the bond for her only to see she is sleeping peacefully curled up next to Linn, who is just sitting up and staring softly at her. He can tell that Even can feel her too, and he hopes that the peace that Noora is feeling Even can draw upon and feel too.

Even knows the way around the kollektiv’s kitchen by now, and the simple act of Even moving straight to the cupboard below the oven to reach for a saucepan that Isak didn’t even know was there makes butterflies fly up in his stomach. The simple domesticity of the way he hums to himself as he flits around the kitchen, firing up the stove and getting the water ready, is almost more than what Isak’s heart can handle.

“Peppermint, English Breakfast or Earl Grey?” Even asks, holding up the tea bags in a fan shape.

Isak frowns. “Is there a difference?”

“Do you like sweeter or more bitter?”

“Um… bitter?”

“Earl Grey it is then,” Even says, ripping open the packet and dipping the tea bag a few times in the steaming cup of tea. He offers it out to Isak, who accepts the tea, curling his hands around the warm mug. Isak sips it tentatively, the taste different in his mouth, but not entirely bad. He sips it again, his insides feeling pleasantly warm.

“What do you think?”

Isak shrugs. “Not bad.”

They don’t speak for a while, just taking half-hearted sips of their tea. Instead, Isak makes them migrate to the window box, somewhere where they always seem to find themselves. He can feel that Even is psyching himself up to tell him something, something important. Isak just sips his tea some more, waits for Even to come to him.

And he does, after a few moments of silence. Isak watches as Even takes a big shuddering breath in, his hands tightening on his mug until his knuckles are almost white. “Something happened. Back… before I was diagnosed, I had the worst episode of my life and I did something… something really bad.”

Even’s eyes flit back down to stare in his tea, anywhere to avoid meeting Isak’s eyes.

“My dad struggles with sleep a lot, because he’s always travelling. He was back for a few weeks this time, and when he’s back, he likes to unpack his stuff. Clothes in the wardrobe, books in the bookshelf and… and benzodiazepines in the bathroom cupboard.”

Isak’s stomach drops. The dry, emotionless tone of his voice, the way Even can’t meet his eyes; Isak knows exactly what Even is telling him. He sets his cup down on the side table next to them, forcing himself to look at Even.

“Can I hug you?”

Even just nods, and before Isak realises he’s done it he has completely wrapped himself around Even, clinging onto him and trying to make him feel the true depth of what Isak feels for him.

“I’m so glad you’re alive.”

They stay like that for a long time, Isak almost completely sitting on his lap and Even just resting his head gently on his own. He doesn’t cry, he’s already used up all of his tears, but Isak can feel the way that this feels like a release, that this is yet another weight off of his shoulders. That for once in his life he doesn’t have to hold this burden alone.

“So am I,” Even whispers. “So am I.”

-

 

They end up on the couch, Even’s head resting on Isak’s chest, cradled in his arms. It’s nice, the peace that has settled over them, the way that there are no expectations here but to just be there. Isak is lazily carding his fingers through Even’s hair, gently teasing out the knots. He’s surprised at how solid Even’s presence feels, like he’s actually here in Oslo and not in Amsterdam.

The sun is shining through the window, the sky is blue and there are only white fluffy clouds in the sky, and in the back of Isak’s head, something clicks over and everything around him just starts to seem a little brighter than it was before.

Even looks up at him, a hesitant smile gracing his face. Isak returns the smile, a twinkle in his eye. “You’re back, aren’t you?”

Even rests his head back down on Isak’s chest, humming his affirmation softly. Isak can feel the reverberation in his chest. “I missed them.”

“And they fucking missed you too, ay!” Chris is sitting by the sofa, her knees brought up to her chest. Isak turns his attention away from Even and looks out at the kollektiv lounge room to see the whole of his cluster sitting around, each one of them having paused what they were doing in order to come and see the man in their head who had been missing for a while.  

Noora shuffles in from the kitchen too, her eyes dreary with sleep. She reaches out for Isak’s hand, and he untangles it from Even’s hair, reaching over to give it a squeeze. She curls up on the other end of the couch, tucking her feet in underneath her and resting back against the arm of the sofa. Chris leans back against her legs.

Even’s body stiffens slightly above him. “If you guys want to know why I went missing, you can look through my memories and see for yourself.”

“We can do that?” Magnus blurts, his eyes wide.

“Yeah, we can.” Even pauses. “If you want to know, you can look. I don’t mind.”

“No.” Vilde’s voice cuts into the silence, her voice firm. “No. This is something that you need to explain to us. We can’t just go rummaging through your memories. That’s not fair on you, okay? You don’t have to explain it to us now. When you’re ready to, we’ll be here to listen.”

“Yeah seriously bro, no pressure at all. Take your time yeah,” Mahdi reaffirms.

There’s a hum of agreement through their cluster bond, and Isak can feel the way that they are all trying to reassure Even that they will wait for him to come to them. The fact that they are here, Isak thinks, despite blocking them out of his head for more than a week, should be more than enough for anyone. Some of the tension seeps out of Even’s shoulders.

“Thank you guys. Just uh… thank you.” Isak can feel that Even wants to say more, but the words he has already said took a lot out of him, so he settles back down on Isak’s chest, furrowing in until he is comfortable.

Isak resumes running his hand through Even’s hair, looking up to make eye contact with Jonas, who just raises a furry brow pointedly. Isak quirks his head, grinning back at him, feeling the genuine happiness that Jonas has for him pulse through their bond.

He doesn’t know how he got so lucky with the people in his head. Each one of these people that surrounds him right now has been nothing but patient and kind and understanding with every single thing he has thrown at them, and who he has been lucky enough to be able to experience part of life with each of them. There is an infectious happiness in his chest, and as much as he has a reputation of being the world’s biggest grump, he can’t keep the feeling inside him, instead letting it spill out over the bond.

Eva, who is leaning against the headboard of the couch above Isak, reaches down to poke him in the cheek. “Well in Whoville they say that the Grinch’s small heart grew three sizes that day,” she sing-songs at him. He swats away her hand and rolls his eyes at her.

Before anyone else can tease Isak about the way he is feeling, Eskild’s heavy footsteps sound from the hallway.

“Hey Isak. Noora.” He looks up to see the man himself in the doorway, clutching a steaming mug of something in both of his hands. Eskild is smiling wistfully, his head resting gently against the door frame. “Is everything all good now?”

Isak looks around at all the people who love him unconditionally, his heart threatening to leap out of his chest. He looks down at Even too, a boy who loves him and who he loves back. Isak can feel the way Even smiles into his chest, which forces a smile onto Isak’s face as well. The feeling he felt all those months ago at Sana’s house, the loneliness that he felt when he saw how happy she was with her family; that feeling is gone now. The contentement he feels now, around the people that are his family, has replaced it. “Yeah,” he says back, his voice fond. “Yeah, it is.”

 

-

**Author's Note:**

> feedback is always appreciated :)
> 
> come talk to me @ napolecnsclc on tumblr


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